


Seven Days in Heaven

by on_the_wing



Category: Starfighter (Comic), Starfighter Eclipse
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crack, Helios outfits may be SLIGHTLY exaggerated, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-17 17:03:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13081332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/on_the_wing/pseuds/on_the_wing
Summary: While exploring the captain’s cabin on the derelict, Helios blacks out and wakes up in a world that gives its inhabitants whatever they want. But is what he wants really there?





	1. Brave New World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [prismatic-cannon](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=prismatic-cannon).



> This story was the result of trying to include ALL the requested pairings. I know I didn't have to do that--I just wanted to see if I could. I think I got most of them in, although most are only brief mentions.
> 
> Happy generic and/or specific winter holidays! :D

Maybe this was a bad idea. The walls...they're almost throbbing. It feels like they're pushing inward towards me. I think...I think I should get out of--

**AAAH!**

***

I can’t see. Everything’s dark! What was that?! A snuffling sound. A wet slurping.

AAH! I can feel a tongue— _a tongue!_ —through the glove of my suit. Is this an alien? Was it lying in wait? Why would it lick me? Get off me oh god oh god oh god—  
  
Wait, maybe I should try opening my eyes. Oh. It’s a dog! That’s what dogs look like, right? There’s something strangely familiar about it. Well, him. He’s slender and charcoal gray, with a long nose and floppy ears fading into white at the tips. He sniffs my outstretched hand, then barks sharply. Why is there a dog on a deserted alien ship? How can he breathe? What has he been eating? Is he even real? Maybe he’s some kind of hologram. Or maybe I hit my head when I fell down.  
  
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I tell the apparent dog, “but you remind me of someone I know.”  
  
He gives me a long-suffering look, then barks again. I think he wants me to get up.  
  
“Okay, okay.” I press my hand into the floor to push myself up—but wait, this isn’t a normal floor! I would’ve noticed it right away if it weren’t for the dog distracting me. It’s soft and slightly damp and has an odd texture like finely chopped lettuce. Why is there lettuce on the floor? Is some giant alien making a Helios salad? I look down.  
  
That’s not salad, that’s…grass! It’s actually growing out of the floor—well, ground, I guess. I look up. There’s no ceiling in sight, just a deep, vivid blue-black scattered with stars and a big round moon like Earth’s. A real sky, with real atmosphere.  
  
“How did I get here?” I ask the dog. I feel a bizarre urge to call him Selene.  
  
The Selene-dog huffs softly. I climb to my feet, brushing myself off. It’s still pretty dark, but I can see that I’m in a small walled courtyard, lined with grass and flowering bushes. The dog barks again, and takes a few steps past me toward the building. I follow him to a door, and tentatively knock. Nothing happens.  
  
The Selene-dog barks again, much louder this time. Muffled footsteps grow louder, and as the door begins to open a familiar voice yawns, “Selene, are you sure you want to come back in now? You only just got out there.”  
  
I look down at the dog. “Whoa, your name really is Selene? That is too much of a coincidence.”  
  
“Oh wow! Hello!”

I look up at—myself?!  What. It’s like looking into a mirror, if a mirror gave you artistic stubble, long magenta-streaked hair in a messy bun, and a bright red t-shirt with a weightlifting Santa that says WELCOME TO THE NORTH SWOLE. I definitely am not wearing that myself. I look down before I can think--nope, still in the spacesuit.   
  
“How—” I begin. He mimes taking off the helmet, and after a moment I reluctantly do so.  
  
“I’ve been wishing I could find a newbie,” he warbles. Do I really sound like that?  
  
“What—how—”  
  
“Nobody knows,” the other me says. He's disgustingly cheerful. “I take it you just got here?”  
  
“Um, yes. Where is…here?”  
  
“You’re in my backyard.”  
  
“I mean—”  
  
He laughs. “I know! Just kidding. Come on in, there’s no point in standing out here. You can’t see anything properly until morning.”  
  
I follow the other me into a kitchen that is probably bigger than the room Selene and I share on the Kepler. “I’m so excited,” he babbles. “You’re the first newbie I’ve found! And you’re a Helios, too! Were you on the Cassini?”  
  
“No, the Kepler.”  
  
“Oh, okay. I know some people from there. But you were partnered with Selene, right?”  
  
“Yeah.” I feel dizzy. The Selene-dog presses reassuringly against my leg, and I lean down to pet him. Dogs like that, right? He seems to. Would _my_ Selene like that? Hmm.  
  
“Here, have a seat.” The other me pulls out a chair from the kitchen table. “Want a beer?”  
  
“Uh…sure.” Maybe that will help this make sense. He hands me a dark brown bottle, and I stare at it for a moment. Beer comes in bottles? How do I even open this? I try twisting off the metal cap, but nothing happens. Maybe it’s these gloves.  
  
“Oh, sorry, I forgot, you don’t have an opener in that suit. Let me get that for you.” He produces a weird little pointy metal object and uses it to pry off the cap. Huh. Why would they make a container that you have to have a separate object to open?  
  
I take a cautious sip—what if it turns out to be soda or fizzy wine and they just _call_ it beer? Oh, it _is_ beer, but it tastes weird. Thicker and more bitter and kind of—nutty? It’s really nice, actually, if you take it for what it is instead of expecting regular beer.  
  
He notices my confusion. “Oh yeah—this is Earth beer, a special kind. One of the Cains who dates an Abel got me into it and now I’m hooked.”  
  
_The_ Cains. _An_ Abel. I try to focus. “So you—named a dog after Selene? How does he feel about that?”  
  
“Naw, he just _is_ a Selene. A dog Selene. There are dog versions of everyone here. _We’re_ a blue heeler!”  
  
“A what?”  
  
“They’re really cute. They’re from Australia and they herd cattle. I can show you one tomorrow if you like.”  
  
“So there are a lot of us here?”  
  
“Yeah, we’re the most common! We’re maybe…three quarters of the population?”  
  
“Helioses are?” What is the plural of Helios, anyway? "Or blue heelers?"  
  
“Helioses. Not all of us had that task name though. And we have a few different real names. Mine’s Afanasi.”  
  
“Oh, mine’s—”  
  
“No, let me guess. I think you look like a….an Afon!”  
  
What the fuck. “How did you know?”  
  
“The same way you knew Selene pup was Selene. You just know. It’s obvious. Usually.”  
  
“Oh.” I digest this. “So do Afons look a certain way, or talk a certain way, or something?”  
  
He thinks. “A lot of you have that haircut when you get here. With the shaved part?”  
  
“An undercut?”  
  
“I guess. I don’t know many hairdressing terms—I mostly let the Phoboses handle that.”  
  
I snort before I can stop myself. “Phobos does hair?”  
  
“Who else would? One of the Cains tried for a while, but he kept giving everyone versions of his own haircut no matter what they asked for. And of course the Praxises wouldn’t go to him. The Phobos barbers are bossy, but at least they’re good at what they do.”  
  
“The ship’s barber isn’t here?”  
  
“No, he’s never shown up. Neither have the commanders, or…most people onboard, actually. This place seems to be sort of…focused on us. The Helioses, that is.”  
  
“What IS this place? Why are there all these versions of us? Are we clones?”  
  
“No one knows for sure what it is, or where. As far as we can tell we’re not clones, we’re just from different universes. Everyone has their theories. I think—a lot of us think—that we’re probably dead, and this is the afterlife.”  
  
“Whoa. Um, why—”  
  
“What’s the last thing you remember before you got here?”  
  
“I was…on the derelict, going into the captain’s cabin. There was this flash—”  
  
The other me—Afanasi, I guess I should call him—nods. “That’s what happened to most of us—the human ones, anyway. Some people were in other places on the derelict, though. I think we triggered some kind of trap and got offed.”  
  
I want to sit down, but I’m already sitting down. “Why do you think that?”  
  
“Well, why else would we suddenly wake up here? And—well, I guess I haven’t told you about how this place works yet. It’s a lot like heaven is supposed to be. I mean, it’s not _perfect_ , but it’s pretty great. It’s like—not all the regular laws of physics work here. It just arranges itself around what people want.”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“You should really ask a historian about it. I’ll bring you down to the registration office tomorrow and they can tell you a lot more than I can.”  
  
“Okay….”  
  
“But the reason I think we’re dead, one of the reasons, is that this place gives us what we want. It gives everyone stuff they want, but when a lot of people want conflicting things, like for public spaces, it usually decides in favor of the Helioses. Although maybe that’s just because we’re the majority.”  
  
“You mean it’s…Helioscentric?” I can’t help but ask. He fingerguns me and we both cackle. Why am I laughing? “So…how does it work?”  
  
“Things just appear when you’re not looking. The sky, for example. That wasn’t always here. I mean, it’s been here since before I got here, but the older Helioses say it was a ceiling at first. It wasn’t until some navis got here that we had a sky, or grass or trees. We like it this way too though, or it would probably still be ceiling.”  
  
“So Helioses were the first ones here?”  
  
“Yeah. There were probably a few dozen before anyone else showed up. Then there was a Selene, and then an Abel, and a Cain, and eventually most of the people we know from onboard showed up. And…Valentina too.”  
  
“V’s here?!” I almost jump out of my seat.  
  
“A few of her. That’s another reason I think we’re dead. Because…you know, she’s probably dead too. At least in my timeline. I don’t know about yours.”  
  
“Well what does she say? They say? What happened to them?”  
  
“The same thing that happened to us. A derelict, and some kind of flash. And then they were here.”  
  
“But—why only a few of her? We must all want her back.”  
  
“We do. And we all have her back—some of her, anyway.”  
  
I shudder. That sounds too much like she’s in pieces. “Is….how can you tell if your version is here? Can she tell if you’re hers?”  
  
“Well…the Valentinas all got together and decided not to play favorites. Because there were so many of us, and so few of them. They try to visit all of us as often as they can, and they all treat all of us like we’re theirs. But if you want to get technical…people from the same reality always show up at the same time, usually within a few meters of each other. So if you’re the only one who showed up in my backyard, you’re probably the only one here from your reality.”  
  
I’m trying to hide my disappointment when a thought strikes me. “But your yard isn’t that big! And it has a wall around it. What if they’re outside the wall?”  
  
“Well, Selene would have let me know if there was another stranger anywhere close. But if there _is_ anyone else out there, someone will find them and bring them to the registration office tomorrow. Or maybe tonight, if they’re really impatient. In any case they’ll let you know soon.”  
  
I want to go out and look for myself, but Afanasi doesn’t seem to want to, and I don’t know this area the way he does. And I don’t know, maybe it’s a good thing if I’m the only one. If being here means you’re dead. Can I really be dead? I feel perfectly alive. More alive than usual, almost. My fingers ache from clutching the bottle. Oh, I still have my gloves on, along with the rest of the suit, of course. I’m starting to feel a little strange, sitting in someone’s kitchen in (almost) full space gear. I strip off my gloves and run my finger along the neck of the bottle.  
  
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Afanasi says. “I was really upset, actually, when I first got here.”  
  
“When did you get here?”  
  
“Hmm, hard to say. Time can be a little vague here. I think maybe…a year or so?”  
  
“How old is this place?”  
  
He shrugs.  
  
I think. “Wait—if we _are_ dead, and this is the afterlife, why hasn’t it always been here? Why wouldn’t there be other people here that we don’t know? Or our dead relatives? Aren’t you supposed to meet your dead relatives?”  
  
He shrugs again. “I don’t know. Maybe this is just a kind of limbo? Or place to deal with our issues before we move on? Or a place to hang out before we get reincarnated?”  
  
“Does anybody ever die here? Or leave?”  
  
“I think some people go missing sometimes. I’ve never heard of anyone dying, though. Or getting really old, either. I once saw one of us who was like, _fifty_ , but he might have just decided to look that way because it was different.”  
  
“You can do that?”  
  
“Yeah! You can change your appearance any way you want. You can even turn into other things if you really want to.”  
  
“But _how?_ ”  
  
“I don’t know. It’s usually better not to think too hard about this stuff. Some people like to, but it can really make your head spin.”  
  
“But how do you _avoid_ thinking about it?!”  
  
“There’s so much to do here! And after you’ve been here a while you’ll be used to it.”  
  
“Hmm. Okay.” I silently resolve to learn _everything_ and figure it _all_ out. Then again that’s a little silly, isn’t it? I don’t know everything about the society I came from. Nobody does. But back home I was too busy surviving to learn much of anything that didn’t directly pertain to survival, even when I was still in school. It looks like survival is easy here—assuming we’re even alive in the first place!—so I should have more time to learn. If I stay.  
  
“But anyway, it’s really fun to make your hair grow. It works faster if you only do a little at a time. See?” He closes his eyes and concentrates.  
  
“Umm…where am I looking?”  
  
“Just wait.”  
  
“Yeaugh!” A hair on the inner edge of his left eyebrow is suddenly moving. Moving, and looping, and growing longer, almost as if it were sliding out of a hole in his skin. “Whoa.” I bend closer to watch. “That’s so weird. How do you decide which hair to grow? I can’t feel every single hair individually like that.”  
  
“You could if you pulled them individually.”  
  
“Oh. Huh.”  
  
“But it’s true I don’t have a mental map of every hair. I just decide on a general area and think about growing only one.” It’s spiraling past his nose now, and his face twitches. “Okay, that’s enough.” He opens his eyes again, and the hair suddenly falls out.  
  
I reach out and catch it, pulling it out straight to examine it. It must be at least 5 or 6 inches long. “Can I do that? Or do you have to learn?”  
  
“It gets easier with practice, but you could try now if you want. Or you could try a tattoo, those are pretty easy.”  
  
“Ooh, how do you do that?”  
  
“Pretty much the same way—just look at the space where you want it and think of the image you want. You might want to try something simple first.”  
  
I roll my sleeve back as far as it will go and stare at the underside of my forearm. The skin flushes, but not with pink or red. Black and grey, peach and tan and coral blossom like tiny, very carefully shaped bruises, and V’s face fades into view. She’s looking up at me from under her forelock, with that wry little smile that says I did something dumb but she loves me no matter what I do.  
  
Afanasi leans over to look, and sucks in his breath. I quickly wipe my eyes, and glance up to catch him doing the same. “That’s—really good,” he says brightly. “I had to practice for weeks before I could get anything to look like that.”  
  
“Oh, uh, thanks.”  
  
“You can change them, too, or erase them. Sometimes they fade away in your sleep, actually.”  
  
“Oh good. I guess I should’ve asked about that first.” I look down at V’s face again and know that there is no way I’m changing that. It’s perfect. She’s perfect. I think as hard as I can, _Don’t ever fade. Don’t ever go_.  
  
When I finally look up, Afanasi says, “You must be sweltering in that suit—I remember they were really hot. Do you want to take a shower and change? You can borrow some of my clothes.”  
  
“Sure, that sounds great.” I’ve been a little distracted but he’s right—this thing was designed for the cold of space and it is not translating well to balmy Earth-type weather. We go upstairs (upstairs! he has a whole house, with two floors! does he live here alone except for the dog?) and he shows me to the bathroom. “The shower works pretty much like what you’re used to, but the hot water doesn’t run out.”  
  
“Wow, awesome! But can’t we just wish ourselves clean?”  
  
“We can, if we want to. But showers are nice, and a few people like to be plumbers, so we keep things the way they are.”  
  
I think. “That makes sense. It would be boring if things were too easy.”  
  
“Exactly!” Afanasi shows me where the towels and washcloths are, and tells me to go to his room and pick something to wear when I’m done. “I’m going to go down and feed Selene. Are you hungry yet? I made some rasolnik yesterday, it’s really good.”  
  
“Oh! Yeah, sure.” He wanders off downstairs, and I peel off the suit and turn the water on. A thousand questions bubble up in my mind, but no one’s here to answer them, so I let them float up and away with the steam. When I’m done, I wrap myself in a huge towel that’s so soft and fluffy I don’t even want to take it off.

Wow, he has a _lot_ of clothes. How many duffel bags would you need to hold them all? How many people would you need to carry them all when—well I guess he doesn’t have to worry about having to get up and run suddenly.  
  
And wow, some of his clothes are dresses or skirts! You can wear those here?! I always secretly wanted to try one, they look so cute and they have so much more variety than things boys are allowed to wear. But I knew V wouldn’t let me because it would draw attention to us, so I didn’t even ask. I rummage through the closet until the smell of soup makes me impatient and I end up grabbing an old t-shirt and sweatpants out of the bureau, mostly by feel. I just want something nice and soft right now, I don’t care what it looks like.  
  
The rasolnik is fucking awesome. I don’t even want to describe it because I want to concentrate on eating it. I’m vaguely aware of Afanasi watching me with a fond smile. When I surface for air I blurt out, “I didn’t know we could cook!”  
  
“Well, it helps when you have fresh ingredients instead of reconstituted dried stuff, but yeah! It’s really cool!”  
  
“Does everybody here know how?”  
  
“Probably not? At least not everyone cooks all the time, because there are some people who specialize in it and if you don’t want to bother you can just go out to eat.”  
  
“Isn’t that expensive?”  
  
“Well…we don’t exactly use money. We don’t really need it, because we’re all family, kind of, and would you charge your family to come over and eat at your place?”  
  
I put my face in my hands. “I understand that, but it’s still so _weird_. I can’t wrap my head around it.”  
  
“I know, it’s really confusing at first. Sometimes I think it would’ve been easier to be one of the earliest people, because you’d get to organize everything and make the rules and change things at your own pace…but then I realize they had to do all the work of figuring out how to run an entire society.”  
  
“So is everything all figured out now?”  
  
“No, it’s always changing as new people come in. So we have to adjust the way things work to fit that.”  
  
I yawn, and belatedly cover my mouth. “I have so many questions, I don’t know where to stop.”  
  
“I know. You don’t have to ask them all at once, though. There’s plenty of time.”  
  
A bit of song threads through my brain. _It’s only forever, not long at all…_ I’m suddenly really tired.    
  
“Do you want to go to bed? I was going to go soon anyway, I get up pretty early.”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“I can make up the bed in the guest bedroom for you. Or…” he hesitates. “You could join me, if you’re feeling lonely.”  
  
Oh! “In, uh, what way?”  
  
“Either. Whatever you want.”  
  
I don’t like having to make the decisions. It’s fine when I’m alone, but if I’m with someone else I would rather they did. Otherwise how will I know that they’re really happy with what happens? He should know that, if he’s me! But that would mean he doesn’t like making the decisions either. Ugh. He just made the decision to ask me, so I guess the next one is mine.  
  
“All right,” I say finally. I am feeling a little lost despite the warm glow from the soup, and…maybe this is conceited, but he is pretty cute. And I’m curious to find out what I’m like in bed—from other people’s perspective, I mean. I wonder if he really _is_ just like me, or if we’re different in some ways? Maybe he has some skills I don’t, like with the soup.  
  
“Selene buddy,” he addresses the dog, “will you be okay sleeping in your kitchen bed for the night?”  
  
Selene looks up and huffs, then rests his chin on the floor again.  
  
“Uh oh, is he going to hate me?”  
  
“Naw, he’ll just judge you for your poor taste, hahaha.”  
  
On the way up the stairs, he whispers, “Don’t let on I told you, but all the Selenes have a _mad_ crush on us. Even the dogs. So they never stay angry for long.”  
  
“They _what_?” I hope I’m not blushing.  
  
“Seriously. We try not to tease them about it because they’re very sensitive, but they’re so cute when they blush, it’s really hard not to.”  
  
“ _All_ the Selenes?”  
  
“Yep.”  
  
“So you think _my_ Selene…”  
  
“I don’t think, I _know_. Every single one of them does. They don’t all date us—actually a few of them will only date other Selenes—but they all want us. The Selenes were all talking about it at one of their guild meetings, and later one of them confessed it to one of us when he was drunk.”  
  
“Whoa. You have to stop dropping all these bombs on me, man. I can only take so many at one time.”  
  
“Sorry.” Afanasi smiles at me ruefully and reaches out a tentative hand to touch my shoulder. “I know it’s a lot. I remember…when I got here.”  
  
And there it is again, that unnerving yet comforting feeling, hitting me like a wave; his face is my face but with the wrong hair, his body is my body but it’s wearing the wrong clothes. I can’t stand the confusion anymore, so I step forward, close my eyes, and kiss him. I feel his hands on my face and in my hair, and my palms settle over the muscles running along his spine. We explore each other, finding nothing different but everything new.    
  
After a minute or so he breaks off and murmurs, “Do you want to go in now? To the room, I mean,” and we both snicker for much longer than that was worth.  
  
He turns back the covers, pulling out a huge stuffed tuna (what?!) and propping it against the wall by the foot of the bed. I crack up again at its wild, offended expression. Afanasi snorts, then gets into bed and pats the covers next to him. “He can’t see us,” he reassures me. “He’s not looking in the right direction.”  
  
“Well okay then.” I climb in and slide my hand under his shirt to rest against his back. We lie still in the darkness for a moment, waiting. Then I let my lips wander to his neck, and his hand curls around my hip, and we’re pulling each other closer, unhurried, letting the heat slowly rise until it fills us and we need to let it out. He whispers something I need to hear, and it’s so embarrassing I want to sink through the floor, but I realize that if he knows to say it that means he wants to hear it too. So I say it back, awkward but tender, and he rolls on top of me and kisses me until all I feel is warmth, like a seed tucked into a blanket of soil.  
  
“Most of us sleep with another Helios first, when we get here,” he tells me later. “I did. We’re probably looking for something familiar. That’s what Selene says.”  
  
“Your dog?”  
  
“No,” he laughs. “A human Selene. I’m only good friends with one of them, although I know a few, of course.”  
  
“Is he… _your_ Selene?”  
  
He stirs. “No, mine didn’t come through. Just Morena.”  
  
“Who?”  
  
“One of the techs. She was on the derelict with us, down with Praxis and Ethos in the engine room.”  
  
“Did she come out close to you?”  
  
“Maybe a block away. We both came out on the street.”  
  
“Then someone from my place could’ve too!”  
  
“Maybe. But do you really want to run around in the middle of the night in your pajamas when you could just wait till morning and find out for sure?”  
  
“What’s wrong with running around in the middle of the night in your pajamas?” I feel vaguely rebellious.  
  
I can feel him smiling. “Nothing.”  
  
I draw in a deep breath, and feel my body relax again. Afanasi smells familiar but different from me, which both does and doesn’t confuse me. I think I’m going to be feeling this way a lot in the coming days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "It's only forever, it's not long at all" is from Underground by David Bowie, from the Labyrinth soundtrack. If this story were a movie, it would probably play during the credits.


	2. Corporalis

There’s sunlight seeping in through my eyelids, tickling my brain so I blink and wake up. Where am I? Not at home. Not on the Kepler. It’s too comfortable. I don’t know any place this comfortable. Oh! I remember. I’m… _here_.  
  
I was having a dream. A dream which felt strange, which in and of itself was strange, because what happened in it was entirely normal and boring. It was my first dream with the Kepler in it. I’ve had dreams before about the people I met on the Kepler, but they’ve always been set back home on Mars. I guess my brain hasn’t had time to imprint on the Kepler yet. Or hadn’t. Anyway. I was walking out of the med bay for some reason—who knows why I was in there in the first place—and the MO was lecturing me about getting enough rest and trying to make me drink some water. This was the entire dream, I don’t know why I had it.  
  
Afanasi’s not in the bed anymore, and I stretch all my limbs out, savoring the sheer size and space. It’s like the bed in the fancy hotel that someone took me to once, but without that stiff, formal hotel smell. I can hear the shower running across the hall. After a minute my feet start to itch for the floor, and I get up, drawn toward the window. There’s a plant I didn’t notice last night in the windowsill, with a big bright yellow flower and—oh wow. What is that? It looks like a butt. The flower stalk is absurdly thick and stiff, and it’s growing out of…the butt crack. I can’t believe this. It looks like—wow. This is the best plant ever. It can’t possibly be real. Someone must have created it out of their demented, brilliant, hilarious imagination. I want fifty of them.  
  
“Hey,” says my own voice behind me. I wonder how long it takes to get used to that? “I see you found the living stone, haha.”  
  
“The what?”  
  
“The plant. They’re like, our national plant. They come in a lot of colors, but most of them look like butts.”  
  
“Are they…real? I mean, outside here?”  
  
“They’re totally real. They’re from Earth—I mean, every plant is from Earth, but they would probably do well in the colonies too. They just evolved that way. Nobody bred them or anything.”  
  
We observe a moment of silence for the delicious absurdity of the butt plant. Then I excuse myself to go take a shower, because I’m starting to be a little too aware of Afanasi’s steamy towel-clad presence, in a way that could easily lead to missing breakfast (not to mention complications that I’m not sure I’m ready for). I’m _really_ hungry.  
  
When I get downstairs, I’m relieved to find him appropriately dressed in yellow plaid shorts, pink-flowered green sneakers, and a cropped red t-shirt that says HEALTHY PLANT. He says he’s taken the day off and we can go to the registration office now. “We can pick up breakfast on the way,” he tells my rumbling stomach.  
  
We step out the front door, and the sunlight soaks into my back and hair. There’s a faint vegetable smell that I guess is grass, and the more familiar smell of warm pavement. There are roads and sidewalks, but no vehicles that I can see, except for a bicycle in the distance. Selene-dog nudges my hand for a pat, then trots off down the street. “He’s going to work,” Afanasi explains.  
  
“Work? What does he do?”  
  
“He’s a canine therapist. So, do you want to walk, or fly?”  
  
“Fly?”  
  
“Yeah, so…we decided to keep most of the laws of physics, because it would be too confusing otherwise, but pretty much everyone agreed that it would be cool if we were able to fly. We can also turn invisible,” he adds, “but that’s not very useful because we can all sense each other’s presence anyway. If we’re paying attention, that is. People mainly use it for pranks, or to show that they want to be left alone. So….?” He grins hopefully.  
  
Aaah. That sounds really cool, but I feel like everything is happening too fast already? But he’s bouncing on his toes and it’s so cute, and it would probably be fun, right?  
  
Afanasi looks at me thoughtfully. “You don’t want to, do you? That’s fine,” he says before I can answer, “we’ll walk. But tell me if you ever do feel like it. It’s considered sort of gauche to do it as transportation, so I don’t get to do it very often. _You_ could get away with it because you’re new, though.” Phew.  
  
We stop at a cafe after a few blocks. There’s a me in line in front of us and four more mes at tables, as well as a Selene and an Ethos. The Selene is playing footsie with one of me under the table and holding hands above it. I try not to stare. Afanasi elbows me and grins. “Told you,” he whispers. When we get to the counter, the barista—another me—looks at me and smiles. “Hey! You must be new! Welcome!”  
  
“Came in last night!” Afanasi says proudly, slapping me on the back. “We’re on our way to the registration office now.”  
  
I get lost looking at the menu, so Afanasi orders us bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches, fresh bananas (I’ve never had fresh bananas!), and coffee. Everything is free???! It makes me a little nervous.  
  
We start walking again, eating as we go. Afanasi shows me how to peel my banana without squishing the end, and I take a bite. It’s weirdly soft—I can even separate each bite into three sections with my tongue. Really good though! A passing Selene looks at me, turns bright red and hurries off. What did I do?  
  
The scenery around us is a mixture of trees, grass, and largish buildings whose function is unclear—are they apartments, office buildings, or both? Most of them are covered with complex, colorful murals; one is still in progress, being worked on by a shirtless, paint-flecked me in a wide-brimmed hat. I’m starting to get used to seeing all the multiple versions of me and other people from the Kepler.  
  
We turn off into a very grand-looking marble building with fancy half-naked statues and a bunch of pillars in the front. Something seems a little strange about them, and after I’ve gone through I realize there were an odd number of them—seven, I think. Just inside, there’s an arch with some foreign words carved into it: CORPORALIS, SOSPITAS, OCCUPATIO, SOCIETAS, POTESTAS, PROPOSITUM, PROGRESSIO. Hmm, seven of them, too.  
  
The registration office is kind of like the enlistment office back home, but with comfier furniture and more snacks. There’s also a fluffy dark grey cat sleeping in the windowsill. I think it’s a version of me! A human me in a suit with short slicked-back hair, a lot older and more serious and businesslike—I never knew I could be that businesslike!—sits me down and asks me a lot of questions about the place I’m from and what has happened in my life so far. Hours and hours of questions. An Ethos with glasses records my answers on a datapad and takes notes. Halfway through the cat wakes up and wanders over, jumping up on the table and butting his head violently against my nose when I lean down to say hello.  
  
“So,” I finally get a chance to ask, “did anyone else show up last night?”  
  
“Anyone from your timeline?” The business Helios looks up and spears me with a keen glance. I knew my eyes were pale, but I never realized they could look that unnerving. “I’m sorry, no. You were the only one who came through.”  
  
“How do you know?”  
  
“We have sensors in place that monitor that sort of thing. We knew immediately when you arrived, but since you were discovered by a resident, there was no need to send someone to pick you up.”  
  
“So…what happens now?”  
  
“Every new resident goes through an informal week-long orientation. Someone—or several someones—will show you around the city and give you an overview of the way things work. If you already have an idea of what you’d like to do here, they can take you to visit someone in that profession, although we recommend that you visit worksites for a least a few different professions, since there may be more options available to you than you realize. You can also come back here at any time to ask questions or browse our database.”  
  
He looks at me, and I nod to show I understand. “At the end of the week you’ll come back here and tell us what line of work you’ve decided to pursue. We’ll record it and assign you a permanent residence—you can choose whether you want a pre-existing domicile, or whether you’d like to build your own.”  
  
“That…doesn’t sound like a very long time to make a choice.”  
  
“You can change your profession at any time after you register it—as many times as you like—and the same goes for housing. But we need something to put down for statistical purposes.”  
  
“What if I can’t figure out what I want to do in that amount of time?”  
  
“You need to come up with something. If you don’t, we just put you down as general labor, and we call you if something needs doing.”  
  
“What if I want to do something I’m not qualified for?”  
  
“We would put you down as in training for that profession, and then you would go get that training.”  
  
“It doesn’t have to be a traditional job, either,” Afanasi says from beside me, looking up from his tablet. I almost forgot he was there! “You could decide to be a bird or a dog or a tree or a building or even a pair of pants or something.”  
  
“Whoa. Is that what your Selene dog did?”  
  
“No, he was born a dog. Some of the nonhuman versions of us were always like that. But some started out human and decided to change. Volkov Street a few blocks over,” he waves, “used to be a Helios. But he uh, really liked being stepped on.”  
  
“Ohmygod.”  
  
“And the moon is a Selene. So uh, that job’s full I guess. You could try being the sun if you want, no one’s doing that right now.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
Afanasi shrugs. “Too boring, maybe? I dunno. It just doesn’t appeal to me. But then again, I like being human.”  
  
“What about the wind?”  
  
“The wind is an Athos.”  
  
“Figures.”  
  
The Ethos tries to hide a smile.  
  
“I know, right?” says Afanasi. “If you really want to be that you could probably find some way, though.”  
  
“There are spaces for at least four winds,” the business Helios says, the corner of his mouth twitching. “And that’s only if everyone does it full time.”  
  
“I uh, didn’t realize you could be the wind _part time_.”  
  
“You can if you want to. Almost anything’s possible here.”  
  
“I guess so!”  
  
“As you may have noticed, this place adapts itself to provide what you want. Similarly, our society is built on the idea that every person should have access to the seven basic human desires. It’s somewhat like the seven cardinal and theological virtues of Catholicism or the seven pillars of Ismailism—”  
  
“We have no idea what you’re talking about,” Afanasi interrupts.  
  
“Sorry, comparative religion is one of my hobbies. Anyway, instead of seven things you’re expected to do, we have the seven desiderata, which means things people want and need. At first we actually tried structuring the city into sections based on the seven desiderata like they do with the seven virtues in Dante’s Paradiso, but that didn’t last very long, because it turned out to be impossible to keep the borders consistent. And um, people thought it sounded weird.  
  
“Anyway, these are the seven desiderata.” He counts off on his fingers. “I’ll leave out the Latin names. One, _physicality_ , or fulfillment of physical needs like air, water, food, shelter, and touch. Two, _security_ , which means safety and also the feeling of safety. Three, _occupation,_ for both mind and body. This includes work, recreation, and creative projects. Four, _connection_. This includes personal relationships and wider relationships with the community and the environment. Five, _agency_. The power to get things done and change the world. Six, _purpose_ —that’s pretty self-explanatory, I think. And seven, _growth_. Becoming more than who we were. Because of the special nature of this place, and the nature of our population, we are actually able to provide these things, unlike other human societies today.”  
  
“Mostly,” mutters the Ethos without looking up from his datapad.  
  
“Well of course, we’re not perfect. We can’t guarantee that every person feels a sense of purpose, for example. But we can fulfill the first three needs for everybody—assuming they let us—and support them in their pursuit of the other four.”  
  
I nod. I…think I get it?  
  
“So, I thought that since it’s your first day here, and Afanasi works in agriculture which helps supply the first necessity, you might want to visit his workplace today.”    
   
I look at Afanasi, and he smiles and nods. “Sure,” I tell the business Helios.  
  
“Great! So, Ethos, would you—oh, you have it already.” He hands me a phone. “This has your ID number in it, which is based on your approximate timeline of origin. We use them as phone numbers, essentially, and for identification purposes. You don’t have to show it to get into a bar,” he adds. “It’s more so you can keep track of who is who, since all of us are genetically identical to other people in the population. If you meet another Helios, for example, and want to stay in touch, and he goes by “Helios” and doesn’t use a nickname, it might be hard to find him otherwise, especially if he changes his hairstyle or other appearance markers. You also show your ID if you want to take unusually large amounts of something, or to get limited resources or services. That helps us make sure that everyone’s getting their fair share, and also helps service providers and crafters learn which demographics want their products.”  
  
“How do we know how much of anything is okay to take?”  
  
“The provider often has it posted somewhere, or they might just tell you.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“So, would you like to keep staying in Afanasi’s house for the week? Or we could put you up in a hotel, or find a different host if you’d like to get to know more people.”  
  
I look at Afanasi again.

“It would be great to have you at my place,” he tells me. “But I’m totally cool if you want to try somewhere else.”  
  
“I—um—sure. I’ll stay at your place, then.”  
  
“All right then. That’s all!” The business Helios reaches out to shake my hand. “Welcome to the city!”  
  
Afanasi and I walk out through the arch, and from this direction I can see a plaque on the wall next to it. It reads,  
  
_I loved you, so I drew these tides of_  
_Men into my hands_  
_And wrote my will across the_  
_Sky in stars_  
_To earn you freedom, the seven_  
_Pillared worthy house,_  
_That your eyes might be_  
_Shining for me_  
_When I came._  
  
“That’s from a poem by T.E. Lawrence,” says Afanasi. “An Earth soldier and writer, from old times,” he says in answer to my look. “It’s the dedication to his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Nobody knows for sure who he wrote it for, but they think it might have been a guy he was in love with.”  
  
“It’s...kind of beautiful,” I say awkwardly, and start walking again. I’m not much of a poetry person, unless you count dirty limericks, so I have no idea how to talk about it.  
  
We stop at a food cart for a late lunch—this one’s run by a Helios and a Cain—and then move on toward a less populated area of town, where Afanasi and a few other Helioses (as well as, surprisingly, an Abel) run a small orchard and dairy farm. I’m so enthralled by the goats that it takes me another hour to realize that I never asked the registration office people if it was possible to get back home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please forgive my probably faulty Latin. I tried. :)
> 
> T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) was a pretty wacky guy. I warn you, if you start reading about him it'll be hard to stop.
> 
> The butt plant is, according to Wikipedia, a genus of succulent plants in the ice plant family. It's called Lithops, which means "stone face."
> 
> It might seem a little odd that a society run by Helioses would decide it's gauche to fly everywhere, but it's actually because when you're flying you can see the layout of the terrain below you, which makes it logistically difficult for the city to rearrange itself so as to get you to your destination in the amount of time you want. It's a REALLY big city.


	3. Sospitas

Another Kepler dream. I was walking down the hallway, and I saw Phobos and Porthos. I said hi to them, because why not? They’re kind of mean, but maybe they just need to get to know me. A lot of people are like that. They don’t trust easily, V says, because people have treated them badly. But if you can get them to trust you, you can actually get somewhere with them. I smiled at Phobos and Porthos, and they gave me a funny look. I guess they don’t feel safe around me yet.

This time I wake up when Afanasi climbs out of bed. It’s still dark out, and I remember him saying that they have to get up early to milk the cows and goats. We didn’t have sex last night, just curled up together and went to sleep. I can’t decide how close I want to be to him. I don’t think I want to jump into anything serious, but he’s the only person I know here and for some reason I desperately want to be touched. I did fine sleeping alone back on the Kepler, but I guess I wasn’t really alone because Selene was there in the bunk below me. Maybe it’s just more overwhelming here, because everything is so new and strange and unpredictable.

My new phone is whirring at me, and I pick it up to find a text from the recruitment office. They’re sending someone out to pick me up at 9. When Afanasi gets out of the shower I have the strange urge to cling to him and beg him to stay in bed with me, just for the company. He takes one look at me and gives me a hug, saying, “It’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

“I know,” I say indignantly, probably not fooling him at all. But then—“Afanasi.”

“Hmm?”

“If everyone’s happy here, who does Selene-dog do therapy with?”

“I didn’t say everyone was happy, I just said we get what we want. Mostly. Getting what you want doesn’t always make you happy.”

I shift. “What if someone wants to go home?”

He pets my shoulder. “This _is_ our home, the real one. We never had one before, remember? Everyone has their own place to live, enough to eat, a job they like, a whole city full of friends and family. We don’t have to risk dying or kill people for it either.”

“You said there were people that disappeared. Maybe they went back?”

“Afon, no one knows how to get back. There probably isn’t any way to do it. Those people could’ve moved on, they could have decided to be furniture or birds or rocks, they could have even decided to stop existing, I don’t know.”

I want to ask him if he would want to go back, but what comes out of my mouth is, “Why did you want a newbie?”

“I—” he stops. “I just did.”

I wait.

“I….guess I wanted to help someone who was going through what I did when I first got here? I was really messed up when I came through, not like you. You were so calm about it. I thought I was going crazy and I ran off to the woods and hid for the first couple days. Selene-dog came and found me and kept me company until I got brave enough to come out and look around. And even then I hid from people for a week or so. I was sneaking into houses and stealing food. Which is so ridiculous! They would’ve given it to me if I’d just asked.”

“Wow. I’m sorry it was like that for you.” It’s my turn to pet his shoulder.

“It’s okay, I’m fine now. I just needed some time to get used to it here.”

He gets dressed, kisses me on the cheek, and leaves for work. I dawdle in the shower and take a long time picking out clothes, eventually settling on a somber ensemble of purple and blue camo shorts, chartreuse sneakers, and a black t-shirt that says WANTED DEAD _AND_ ALIVE: SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT.

I can’t make myself eat much breakfast. The doorbell finally rings, and when I open it I get a punch in the gut. Not a literal punch, but there she is, V, standing there with her little smile like she’d never left me. “Oh kiddo,” she says, pulling me into her arms. “Don’t cry. It’s okay.” Her leather jacket smells like smoke and home.

“I made a tattoo of you,” I sniffle, and turn up the underside of my wrist.

“Look at that! That is toooo beauuuutiful. You flattered me, you smooth customer.” She’s imitating the tone our neighbor Anna Stepanovna used to take with her pet rats, and I crack up. How can this not be my V? Her hair’s a little longer, but I haven’t seen her in a long time.

“Where were—” I begin, and stop. I suddenly don’t want to know. If we are all dead here, that means she’s dead too, and I don’t want to know about it. “Where are we going?” I ask instead.

“Well, I thought you might like to come along with me on my rounds. That’ll give you a chance to see a bunch of different workplaces and meet some new people.”

“New people?”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“Yeah. So what do you do?”

“I’m a security officer—it’s not what it sounds like,” she insists in response to my incredulous look. “It’s a little bit cop, a little bit social worker, a little bit…everybody’s friend. I make people feel more secure.”

“Huh.” I wouldn’t have believed this if it were anyone but V saying it. “Are there real cops too?”

“Nope, we’re it. But we do fine. Everyone has the same access to materials and opportunities, and no one’s rich or poor, so you don’t get a lot of serious crime.”

“You must have jail though, right?”

“We have a few stations where we can take people and keep them for observation, but no one stays there for more than a few days at most. And it’s empty most of the time—really, the hardest thing about it is keeping away the people who want to be thrown in there for other reasons.”

“Why would you want to go to jail?”

“Some people find it comforting. Remember, it’s not like regular jail.” She hesitates. “A lot of…us are security officers.”

“Valentinas?”

“Yeah.”

“So they do it…to get more attention from you?”

V nods. “We try to give everyone equal time, but some people want more—or need more, however you choose to see it. We try not to encourage them, although the fact that they’re doing it usually means that something else is missing in their lives, so we do investigate that and try to help them get what they need.” She pats me on the back. “Let’s start walking, okay?”

We start off down the street. I feel nervous not locking the door behind me, but it doesn’t even have a lock! “Do people really not steal things here? Or fight?”

“Some people do. A lot of people still have issues left over from before they got here. Some people don’t get along with each other, and some people get bored and start fights or steal things for fun. There are other people who like to test the limits of what they can do here, and that…doesn’t always end well.”

“Does anything really end here?”

V turns and gives me a long look, then slaps me gently on the back. “Asking the hard questions early on! Good for you!”

I wait.

“I, uh…all right, I admit I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

“Does anyone ever die? Or anything?”

“I don’t know of anyone who’s actually died permanently. Some people try physically dying to take a break, or because they want to disintegrate and merge with the landscape to become closer with it, or because they’re experimenting with being zombies or whatever. As far as I know they all reform eventually into a living form. Most of the ordinary plants and animals age and die permanently. Some people have versions here of pets they had before, and some of those don’t age or die. We can’t be sure about all the wild plants and animals.”

“Wow, I never would’ve thought of dying _temporarily_.”

“Haha, I know right? People get very creative here.”

“Afanasi thinks we’re all dead here and this is the afterlife,” I blurt out.

“That is a popular theory,” she says carefully. “He shouldn’t have said that right away, though. You need some time to learn the facts and come to your own conclusions. If you even want to, that is. A lot of people have concluded that they just don’t care how they got here, since they’re here now and it’s better than where they came from.”

“I want to _know._ ”

“You could always decide to become a scientist. Some of them dedicate their time to working on that question.”

“We can—I mean, Helioses really can do that?” I was never very good at science in school, and ugh, look what happened when I tried to study for the navigator exam.

V stops and takes me by the shoulders. “Little bro, you can do or be anything you want here. I mean it. I know they told us that in school and it was a lie, but it was only a lie _there_. It’s different here. There are versions of you here in every job, and you all kick ass.”

I think I’m blushing. “I—uh. Okay.”

She takes my arm and starts walking again. We stop often to talk to people on the street and in stores and workshops, mostly versions of me. They’re usually cheerful, but V often has to gently pry herself loose. One of them looks at me with undisguised envy—it’s really strange to see that on my own face. I don’t blame him, but god, I hope I don’t get like that.

We stop at a house, and V tells me that this is her first assigned case of the day. This guy has been taking a lot of food and clothes lately, more than he could possibly use, and sometimes doing it secretly, without showing his ID. He’s even been seen sneaking into people’s houses to take handmade things, which are considered much more valuable than “created” things (things that someone just wished into existence). She doesn’t say who he is, but I’m not surprised when the door opens and a Helios face looks out. When I was about eight to ten I went through a phase where I stole candy and hid it in my duffel bag until it was ancient and crumbly. I only stopped because V saw a big smear of chocolate on my supposedly clean shirt and went through my bag. She promised me she would always make sure I got enough to eat, and made me promise never to steal again. I guess this Helios never had that experience, or maybe it didn’t stick.

He looks happy and healthy, but his smile is a little too rigid and he’s obviously trying to block our view of the inside. “Val! So glad you could drop by. And a newbie, nice to meet you! Why don’t you have a seat on the porch and I’ll bring you some lemonade?” Since when do I talk like this? _This isn’t you_ , I remind myself. _It’s…a clone. A doppelganger. Someone who stole my face—NO. Who just happens to share my face. He’s a brother. That’s what he is. You have thousands of brothers now, and they all just happen to look a lot like you._

“That sounds lovely, but Afon here is actually too polite to say that we’ve been walking for hours and he needs to pee. Which goes for me, too. Could we use your bathroom? Sequentially of course, not at the same time, haha.”

His face crumples. “Val, I—”

“Sweetie, it’s okay. It’s me.”

“I know,” he mutters, looking down. “I just—I just don’t want you to—”

“How bad can it be?”

“It’s really bad,” he sniffs.

She throws an arm around him. “Let me be the judge of that, okay?”

“A-all right.” He slowly opens the door, and we file inside. It’s dark in there after the brilliance of the sunlight, and I trip over a pile of something, only just managing to catch myself against the wall.

V turns the light on—I wonder how she knew where the switch was?—and I have to bite my lip to keep from gasping. You can’t even see the furniture, just the shapes that imply it might be under there somewhere. There are mountains and valleys of shoes, shoe hills and shoe dunes. A narrow little path winds through them to the kitchen and out to the stairs.

V looks back and forth, and the other me cringes. “Avon honey,” she says finally. “How many _feet_ do you have?”

After she makes him an appointment with a therapist and arranges for someone to come help him clear out the house, we take a trolley to the outskirts of town. So there _are_ motor vehicles after all! I even see another Valentina on a motorcycle with one of the maintenance tech ladies cuddled up behind her. We get off at a stop where there’s nothing but trees and bushes, other than the trolley stop sign and a flat boulder to sit on. Oh wait, there’s a path into the woods too.

V fiddles with her phone, swearing, and finally starts off down the path, holding it out in front of her. Whenever there’s a fork in the path, she consults the phone. After about twenty minutes the phone lets out a shrill beep and she shouts, “You’ve GOT to be kidding me. Come on, Afon.”

She turns off the path and crashes into the undergrowth, knocking branches aside as she goes. I get whipped in the face a couple times before I learn to keep my hands out in front of me. After a few minutes she stops and says, “We should be almost there n—JESUS FUCK.” Something long and thin is suddenly quivering in a tree trunk next to her face. She yanks it out and inspects it. It’s an arrow!!! “AFON FOR THE LOVE OF CHEESE WILL YOU STOP BEING AN IDIOT. Not you, honey,” she says to me. “AFONNNN.”

“Valentina? Is that you?” There’s a rustling up ahead in the underbrush. “You should’ve said something—I thought you might be a bear. It’s been coming around at night lately, trying to get at my food.”

She crashes ahead again, and we burst out into a tiny clearing strewn with laundry. It’s all made of animal skins! There’s a small tent— _not_ made of animal skins—and a full bag hanging from a high tree branch. And, of course, another version of me. Without the shouting I’m not sure I would have recognized him through the bushy beard, shaggy hair, and sloppy fur cap. He leans over to prop the bow against a tree trunk, then squats over a low fire over which hangs a pot of something that smells like fish. Fish is not the only smell in this campsite, but it’s definitely the most pleasant one.

“Afon what were you THINKING,” V scolds. “You know even when you’re hunting you should call out first just to be sure.”

“Sorry. I haven’t seen anyone in—weeks, I think. I didn’t know you were coming.” He finally notices me. “Oh, you brought a newbie. Hey. Welcome to the wild side.”

I wave weakly.

“Afon’s an Afon too,” V informs him. Or possibly me.

“Yeah, I figured. We’re the smartest ones. Other than you, of course, V.” He grins at me. “Come to live the self-sufficient, self-respecting life?”

“He’s just shadowing me and you know it.”

“For the moment, maybe. But think about it, bro.”

V fusses over him, inspecting his teeth and quizzing him on what he’s eaten lately and how much he’s been sleeping. He pretends to be annoyed, but I can tell he secretly enjoys the attention. “We get too attached to things,” he tells me loftily. “Too attached to conveniences. And too attached to people. We’ll never be truly strong until we know how to live on our own, out in nature, without all that city hocus-pocus.”

“Uh huh,” I say.

He nudges V. “You don’t, uh, happen to have any chocolate, do you?”

She lets out a tiny snort. “You can have all the chocolate you want if you come back to civilization and see a doctor.”

“I don’t NEED to see a doctor. I feel fine!”

“That’s _why_ you see the doctor, so you can keep on feeling fine.”

“ _I_ don’t need to do that, because my lifestyle makes me healthier than you city people.”

“Sweetie, we’ve had this talk before. How many times have you had food poisoning in the last month? When’s the last time you ate something with vitamin E in it? What’s going to happen if you fall and break a bone out here with no one to help you?”

He sighs loudly.

“Just come back once a week—even once every couple of weeks—have a decent meal and a shower, talk to someone a little so your trap doesn’t rust shut. You can even bring something to trade so you’re still self-sufficient. All those old Earth guys who lived in the woods, they still came back in to trade their goods every so often.”

“I guess…”

“You could even trade for information. You’re learning so much out here, I’m sure a lot of people would be excited to get the benefit of your experience.”

“Hmm…I guess it would be an opportunity to show people more about independent living…”

“Yes! Definitely! And you could get some _chocolate_ ….” She pulls a bar out of her pocket and waves it enticingly.

“Give that here!” he yelps, and leaps on her. She tosses it to me, giggling, and wrestles him until he realizes she doesn’t have it. I quickly throw it to him, not wanting to be jumped on.

The trip back to the city center takes up all the daylight that’s left, and we end up getting Chinese takeout and bringing it back home—did I say home? I mean to Afanasi’s house. V’s shift is over but she stays for dinner, and then lingers on for a few more hours, the three of us getting tipsy on weird microbrews and laughing about dumb stuff we did after she left for the military. Finally she hugs us each goodbye and wishes me luck in deciding my future occupation, which makes me realize that she’s not coming back tomorrow. “Keep asking those hard questions!” she tells me. And then, with a kiss on the cheek, she’s gone.

Afanasi and I get very busy putting away the leftovers and washing the dishes, trying not to let the room feel empty. Then it’s bedtime. We climb in and turn the light off, and suddenly I desperately need to kiss him. He kisses me back, and we grasp and tear at each other until a moment comes when we don’t need to anymore. Our hands slow down and our mouths turn gentle, and finally I rest my head on his shoulder and we lie quietly. My dick is still shouting at me, but I tell it to shut up and finally it does.

He says, “It always feels like this after she leaves. But we’ll be back to normal in the morning.”

“I feel better now, actually,” I tell him, and it’s true. He’s here, and outside there are thousands of my brothers, and other people I know besides. I never have to be alone if I don’t want to. And even after seeing all those hungry faces, I feel kind of secure just knowing that she’s out there.

Out there. _My_ V might be out there somewhere in our own timeline, and she’s never coming to this city. What if I fell and hit my head, and this is all a dream? What if staying in the dream means I’ll never wake up, and she’ll never get to talk to me again? _She_ doesn’t have a thousand little brothers, just one. Just me.

I want to tell this to Afanasi, but I know he doesn’t want to hear it. So I hug him tight and say nothing more, and he strokes my hair until I fall asleep.


	4. Occupatio

Another strangely boring dream about the Kepler. Hanging around the bridge for some reason, watching the navigators fiddle around with their tools and bicker about who did what best. Didn’t I have anything better to do?  
  
I wake up feeling impatient and antsy. I want to _do_ something! I’ve been too aimless and passive since I got here. After I get dressed (in hiking boots, cutoffs with a red hand-shaped patch on the butt, and a lime green shirt that says DEVIL’S AVOCADO) and say goodbye to Afanasi and Selene-dog, I decide to go out and look around on my own for a bit.  
  
The first thing that strikes me, now that I’m on my own and no one’s distracting me, is that the houses don’t have numbers and there are very few street signs. Do most of the streets even have names? How do people find each other’s houses? How do delivery people make deliveries? Do they do what V did yesterday and track them down with their phones? If so, does that mean you can only deliver mail if someone’s there to receive it? That doesn’t sound very efficient. I mean, neither is leaving it where your neighbors can steal it, but supposedly most people here don’t steal.  
  
I’m getting hungry, and I start looking out for some place to get breakfast. Even though this area seems to be mostly residential, there’s a cafe right around the next corner! It couldn’t have just appeared there because I wanted it, could it?  
  
I get coffee and a huge fluffy croissant and an orange—an orange! we only had those at Christmas at home, if we were lucky!—and curl up on a sofa in a corner where I can see both out the window and inside. A fine spray of orange oil mists me as I peel the fruit, and I have to restrain myself from licking the peel. I know from experience that it’s bitter!  
  
I see a Helios walk by wearing a short, bright pink dress with little cherries all over it, and feel a little surge of happiness that we can do that. Oh! My phone’s buzzing. It’s the registration office—they’re sending a Morena to show me around today. A who? Oh, one of the maintenance techs. I tell them where I am, and they say she should be there in half an hour or so.

A minute or so later, I wonder how she’ll be able to tell which Helios is me. A lot of people seem to be able to tell that I’m new—I wonder how they do it? Is it my expression? The way I look at things? Do I dress in some way that marks me as an outsider? It shouldn’t be that—I’m wearing Afanasi’s clothes, after all. I know! I’ll pretend to be a regular, non-new Helios when she comes in, and see if she can find me.  
  
While I wait, I nibble on the croissant and fiddle around with my phone. What kind of internet do they have here? It can’t possibly be as diverse as what we have back home—there just aren’t as many people to put things up in it. Hmm. None of the icons on the desktop are clearly labeled as internet, so I start opening them at random. One of them, called “LOPHI,” with an icon of a smiling fish with some kind of droopy stalk on its head, turns out to be a browser. It seems to be more or less like the Kepler’s intranet, except the ads are for little businesses or websites I’ve never heard of instead of big name companies. And the games and movies are free, even the good ones! Hmm…a lot of them are ones I know from back home, though. So not everything is made here. I wonder how that works? Did these things from home just appear here because someone wanted them? Or is there a connection somehow to the internet back home? Would it be possible to contact people at home over the net here?!  
  
I’m about to ask the browser for email, when I have a different thought. I type in “Kepler ship” and find that yes, there is a wiki page on it. It has pictures, schematics, history, and a crew list that includes the approximate percentage of the city’s population that is made up by each member. The percentages are really skewed. 73.69% Helios, 2.25% Selene, 3.92% Abel, 1.78% Cain…huh, 7.12% Morena….most of them are at zero, though, meaning that none of them came through to the city. They all have their own pages, though, even the ones where nobody came through.

I click through to a couple and skim through biographical details (composited from all the different timelines), test scores, psych profiles—these are Federated Alliance profiles! how did they get them?! We don’t get to see our own, much less anyone else’s—most common occupations they have in the city here…these things are really long. I’m tempted to look up my own, and Selene’s, and everyone else’s that I know from the Kepler, but I feel a little weird about it, and besides, each one would take hours to read. Maybe later.  
  
And hey, I just realized I forgot what I was there to do—see if it was possible to contact the Kepler. Or someone back on Mars. What would happen if I sent a message to Selene’s onboard email? I search the page for “contact” and find nothing relevant, so I open a new tab and search for FAmail, the Alliance’s email system. I want to see if I can get into my own email account—will my previous emails be there?  
  
“Hey—Afon?”  
  
I look up to see a pale woman with long straight brown hair, holding a giant to-go cup. She looks a bit familiar, I guess. And hmm, she _did_ know who I was! I didn’t even have time to pretend I wasn’t new. “Hi. Are you Morena?”  
  
“Yeah. I go by Carla, though—that’s my first name. How are you doing so far?”  
  
“I’m fine. How are you?”  
  
“I’m good. Coffee is good. Coffee makes it aaaaall goooood.” She takes a swig and sits down next to me. “So, I’m a municipal engineer, and I was thinking we might want to go check out the sewers today.”  
  
“Oh, uh….”  
  
She elbows me. “Just kidding! Haha, you should’ve seen your face. I mean we could if you wanted to. It’s actually pretty cool and atmospheric down there, if you don’t mind the smell. Kinda steampunk-looking.”  
  
“Why do you even have sewers? If you can just wish things into existence, can’t you wish them out too?”  
  
“We can, technically, but there are three major reasons why we don’t. One, people found out early on that when you make things too easy, life gets really boring and unsatisfying. We need something to do, you know? It occupies your mind _and_ gives you a sense of achievement. Two, most people find it comforting to have things work like they did in the world they came from, even if they want the end results to be different. Three, it’s a lot harder to for this place to handle things on a large scale if everyone’s wishing for different stuff. It doesn’t work as well and weird things start happening.”  
  
“Wouldn’t wishing sewage out of existence be the same wish though?”  
  
“You would think! But it turns out everyone actually has different unspoken ideas about how that would happen. Some people want to never have to go to the bathroom in the first place. Some of them imagine it disappears after you flush. Some of them imagine a transformation process where it turns into clean water and dirt or fertilizer or something. Some of them just imagine it teleporting to someplace uninhabited, where it fertilizes the land in some vague way. Some of them actually like the idea of sewers, because wading through the sewers and running into monsters there is such a common trope in fiction.”  
  
“So how _does_ it work?” I don't even know why I'm asking this.  
  
“Basically we maintain the usual infrastructure that you would find anywhere else, but then we disappear the concentrated sludge instead of recycling it or putting it in landfills. Same for trash.”  
  
“So who does the gross parts? There must be a lot of important but smelly jobs that no one really wants to do.”  
  
“Actually we have a few people who are really interested in trash. Although granted, they’re more interested in cataloging and studying it than they are with picking it up. But yeah, there are tasks that are unpleasant to most people or get repetitive. There are a few different ways we handle that. Sometimes the unpleasant stuff is part of a generally pleasant job, and people do it just because they know they need to. Sometimes we call in general labor for it, and rotate the people so no one has to do any one thing for too long. Sometimes we offer incentives or trade favors.”  
  
“Incentives? How does that work when people can just wish anything they want into existence?”  
  
“Well, you went out there with a Valentina yesterday, so you must have noticed that human attention—especially from the right people—is one of the few things that can’t be conjured up from thin air. Neither is approval, or power, or people liking and wanting the products you make.”  
  
Without thinking I look at my wrist. V is still smiling out at me. “So…how do you trade that stuff?”  
  
“Extra visits or longer visits from the Valentinas. Advertising spots online or on podcasts or radio shows. Stuff like that.”  
  
“Oh. Huh. Okay.” I’m disturbed at the idea of using time with V as a trade item, but how is that much different from people in the colonies who have to pay to go see relatives on Earth? Or the way I, well, more or less rented myself to the Alliance to go be with her? Let’s not think about that too hard. “How is it that these versions of me have all these different interests? I can’t really imagine being interested in…trash, or plumbing, or sewer systems or whatever.”  
  
“It’s amazing what you can get interested in if you actually start doing it, or even start thinking about it. Especially if getting into it was your own idea and you feel like you’re carving out your own niche where you can be an expert. You Helioses were the first ones here, so you planned out most of this stuff on your own because you had to.”  
  
“How did we figure out how to do it?”    
  
“Partly looking it up online, partly just by messing around until you found something that worked. Or sort of worked. People keep making changes all the time.”  
  
I nod. I’m starting to get antsy again. Maybe this is all too abstract.  
  
“Want to hit the road?”  
  
“Yeah, that would be good.”  
  
“Any particular places you’d like to go? Or should I surprise you?”  
  
“I’m not sure.”  
  
“Well, did you have any ideas about what you might like to do? Any impractical childhood dreams?”  
  
“Well, I went through a period when I was little where I wanted to be a detective, but then I found out it you don’t get a talking dog sidekick. Besides, I can’t imagine that you have many murders or jewel thefts here…”  
  
“Well, you could probably have a talking dog sidekick if you wanted one…their conversation gets a bit old after a while if you ask me. But you’re a Helios, so it might be more your style. And you could still be a detective, although you probably wouldn’t get much work.”  
  
“Aww. Well, maybe I can just detect for fun. I don’t know…I haven’t really had any ambitions since I was a kid, I guess, unless you count being a navigator. And that’s not really relevant here—I assume you don’t have a military.”  
  
“It’s okay—lots of people don’t know what they want to do when they get here. Or even for quite a while after they get here. But this is a great place to find out, because you won’t starve while you’re looking around. Actually, general labor can be a good job to start with, because it gets you experience in all kinds of settings and you learn more about how everything works and get to meet a lot of new people.”  
  
“Okay. I guess just take me wherever you think would be useful to know about?”  
  
“Sewers it is! Just kidding, haha. But you know, aside from today, you could always ask LOPHI to give you some career tests. Or ask it which jobs need people right now.”  
  
“You can talk directly to it?”  
  
“Sure, if you want to. It’s got a weird sense of humor sometimes, though.”  
  
We end up on a tour of the hydroelectric power plant on the coast—apparently one side of the city borders an ocean? I guess that makes sense, people must want beaches and boating and fishing and stuff. There’s also a majestic yet suspicious waterfall that empties into a giant bottomless hole in the ground. Carla tells me there’s a scenic windmill district where people actually live in the windmills, but that’s on the other end of town. How big is this “town” anyway? I ask her and she shrugs. “You could ask LOPHI, but I think it’s probably unquantifiable.”  
  
“How can it be unquantifiable? If you have a transit system it must go to the same places every day, right?”  
  
“Yesssss, but who says they always stay in the same place, or in the same order? You must have noticed by now that it usually takes about half an hour to get somewhere unless you’re just going across the street, right? But if you want something right away, it’s just around the corner?”  
  
I think about the cafe this morning. “But why not just have things pop up across the street whenever you want to go somewhere, then?”  
  
“People like walking around and seeing the scenery and meeting other people. And it’s probably more, whaddayacallit, intuitive that way.”  
  
Oh. I guess that makes sense? That would give people a little exercise too, even if they have office jobs.  
  
After lunch, we drop by a bridge which two civil engineer Helioses are testing for damage. I don’t know why they have to test it using a herd of elephants, but hey, why not? Then we visit a paper mill, a construction site, and an environmental research center where people try to monitor the wild animal and plant populations. I always thought I was pretty energetic, but Carla is wearing me out! In a nice way, I mean.  
  
Once the sun sets, Carla finally drops me off back at ho—Afanasi’s house. He’s not home yet, so I decide to go online again. I remember about trying to find my Kepler email, and instead of messing around with search engines, I say, “LOPHI, are you there?”  
  
A smaller window pops up, the fish face icon on the left. I AM EVERYWHERE.  
  
“Oh, I guess you are. Is there a way to get into my email?”  
  
A new tab opens in the main window. YOU CAN VIEW YOUR EMAIL HERE, OR BY CLICKING THE BLUE SPIRAL ICON ON YOUR DESKTOP.  
  
“Hmm. LOPHI, this isn’t the email I meant. I mean the email I had back on the Kepler.”  
  
Afanasi walks in the front door. “Hey, how's it going? I was thinking we could make pizza tonight. How does that sound?”  
  
I blink at him. “Sure. Just a minute though.” I look back at the phone and see that LOPHI hasn’t answered yet. Maybe because it thought my “just a minute” was for it instead of Afon. “LOPHI, can I get into my Kepler email? The FAmail?” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Afanasi glancing over at me.  
  
After a moment a new tab opens, and there’s the familiar ugly gray page. I click on the latest email, something from Selene about how he had to reschedule training, and stare at it. Where _are_ you, Selene? Where am I, for that matter? I hit reply, and type, _Selene are you there? testing testing_. I hit send, but the LOPHI tab pops to the front again, saying DELIVERY FAILED: NO CONNECTION.  
  
“What do you mean? We’re connected to the internet here!”  
  
NO CONNECTION TO MESSAGE RECIPIENT.  
  
“Then how was I able to get into my FAmail?”  
  
YOU CAN ALWAYS ACCESS WHAT IS YOURS.  
  
“Selene is _my_ navigator,” I point out.  
  
PERSONS ARE NOT TO BE CONSIDERED POSSESSIONS AS PER CITY CONSENSUS.  
  
“What are you doing?” Afanasi asks. “And do you want apples on yours?”  
  
“I’m trying to—yeah, sure—trying to get into my Kepler email. I mean, I got into it but I can’t send messages with it.”  
  
“Maybe it’s just an archive, not a functioning program. Sausage?”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“Sausage. On your pizza?”  
  
“Oh sure, yeah. Wait, did you say apples? Like, whole apples?”    
  
“Apple _slices_ , silly.”  
  
“Oh, okay.”  
  
“Basil?”  
  
“What’s that?”  
  
“This.” He brandishes what looks like most of a small purplish-black bush, and then, at my lack of recognition, bounds over to shove it under my nose. He breaks off a leaf, and a piercingly delicious smell fills the air.  
  
“Oh, wow. That smells…almost familiar?”  
  
“A lot of cuisines use it dried and powdered as a seasoning.” I take the leaf from his outstretched hand and pop it in my mouth without thinking. Wow. That is pretty amazing.  
  
“Want to help me roll out the dough?”  
  
“Oh! Sure.” I’ve never baked before! There is so much to learn here. At least we have no shortage of time to learn it in….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was around the point when I started cursing Helios for asking questions and thereby forcing me to come up with answers. But I'm kind of glad he asked them, because it was an interesting exercise and helped me get a better sense of the place.
> 
> What does LOPHI stand for, you may ask? It may look like an acronym, but it's actually a scientific nickname. ;)


	5. Societas

Last night’s dream was _much_ less boring. I kissed Selene! Without even asking! He looked really surprised but he kissed me back (!!!!). I’m a little pissed that it ended there, to tell you the truth.  
  
I peel myself out of bed and look out the window. I can see the street below, strangely clean and nearly empty. One of me walks by with a…Cain dog, I think? The dog looks up at me, somehow feeling my gaze, and the Helios looks up too. He smiles and waves, and after a moment I wave back. Across the street, two people move into view—Selene and Phobos. For a moment I feel a jolt of absurd hope, but then I look at their hair and realize that they can’t be mine. Selene’s hair is entirely dark and too wavy; Phobos’ is short in the back and angled down toward his face. They look too at ease to be new—they’re looking at each other, not at their surroundings. Selene is talking animatedly about something, obviously in manic sarcasm mode; Phobos is looking back at him with wry amusement. I suddenly miss _my_ Selene so much my body aches with it. I haven’t even known him that long! But I still miss him.  
  
This morning, the message from the registration office says that I’ll be going with a general labor gang to see what kinds of work they do. I’m a little iffy about this given what Carla said yesterday, but I figure hey, whatever, I can always leave if it gets really gross. It turns out to be totally fine, even though we do spend some time at a meat plant. Meat vats always give me the heebie-jeebies. At one of the stops we don’t even touch anything—they just needed extra people to come wish a ton of beeswax into existence, because the more stuff you want, the more people you need to wish for it. They gave us little pieces of sample beeswax to concentrate with, and we got to keep them afterward. I keep taking mine out and smelling it for the rest of the day. I can’t believe how good it smells!  
  
After dinner, Afanasi says, “Hey, I’m going dancing tonight. Want to come with?”  
  
!!! Why didn’t I think of that?! “Is space cold?”  
  
We get dressed up in extremely classy outfits with no writing on them anywhere. Afanasi is in a black mesh top, hot pink cowboy boots, and purple-and-black zebra print short shorts. I pick out a shiny gold sleeveless top, tall black boots with lots of straps, and tight black pleather shorts that lace up the side and leave an inch or two of skin exposed. This is _even better_ than that stuff I got at the night market! It’s a good thing we’re the same size in everything, haha. Although hmm, I guess in theory I could wish up something for myself even if we weren’t? I don’t quite trust that to last, though.  
  
When we get there I have to spend at least ten minutes just goggling at all the different clothes. And, of course, the people in them. As usual, most of them are some version of me—oh wow, one is a woman?! I feel proud of our awesome Helios moves, although an Ethos in a silver tux is doing a very impressive robot dance. An Abel and a Phobos are drunkenly pawing at each other in the corner (huh ok), and two Cains are entwined in a tango so obscene that Afanasi has to elbow me and shove a drink under my face. Really I was mostly looking at their hair! I swear. One has a shaved head except for a little black-and-red fringe in front, and the other has an aggressive six-inch-long Mohawk that keeps _almost_ spearing people in the face. What I think of as Cain’s hair is so distinctive that he almost looks like a different person without it. They, I mean. Oh well. Time to dance!  
  
After a while I feel someone watching me from the bar and turn around to look. It’s—wow. It’s a Selene in a short, slinky, shimmery midnight blue dress with long fringe at the bottom. The fringe barely brushes the tops of his stocking-clad knees, and it keeps parting to show…much further up. Aaah, I need to look at his face instead. His hair is like my Selene’s, but shorter and neater, just covering his ears. Is he wearing eyeliner? I think he is. Wow. Oh god he saw me looking. Oh god oh god he’s coming over here.  
  
“Would you like to dance?” he asks, instead of punching me in the face like I deserve.  
  
“I—um—uh—yeah!” Smooth. Real smooth. Afanasi gives me a cheerful thumbs up and melts away into the crowd.  
  
The Selene favors me with a little smile and wraps his arms loosely around my neck. Oh my god I don’t know if I’m ready for this. Except maybe I’m a little _too_ ready for this. I place my hands carefully on his lower back and try to sway along with him instead of rubbing against him.  
  
He gives me a slow blink and purrs, “How do you like the city so far?”  
  
“I—uh—it’s great! Really—interesting.”  
  
“What would you say is your favorite thing about it?”  
  
“Hmm.” I take a moment to think. “I guess how friendly everyone is. What’s yours?”  
  
He leans forward and breathes into my ear, sending shivers all the way to my toes. “Guess.”  
  
“Teasing us?”  
  
He laughs, a nice normal non-teasing laugh that reminds me of my Selene. My Selene doesn’t laugh that often, though. “But you’re so easy to tease.”      
  
“Um…well…I’m glad we can amuse you?”  
  
“Really though, I think it’s the company. Or maybe the flying.”  
  
“Oh, the flying! Afanasi—my host—told me about that.”  
  
“You haven’t tried it yet?”  
  
“No, I—I just wasn’t ready, I guess.”  
  
“Do you want to try it now?” His face rises up a few inches, and I look down and realize that his feet are hovering above the floor.  
  
“Oh! I, um…”  
  
The Selene drifts further upward, holding out his hands. “Come on, Helios. Rise to the occasion.”  
  
“How—do I do it?”  
  
“Hold my hands.”  
  
I reach up and take them, feeling ridiculous.  
  
“Now come up here to me.”  
  
“But—how?”  
  
“Just do it—no, silly, you don’t have to jump.”  
  
I hesitate, and a wicked little smile flits over the Selene’s face. “If you come up here, I’ll give you a kiss.”  
  
And just like that, I’m floating.  
  
“Well look at that. You just needed the right motivation.”  
  
“ _Stop_ it,” I mumble.  
  
“You’re so cute when you blush.”  
  
I suddenly realize that everyone on the dance floor is watching us. We’re floating three feet above the floor, after all! As I look back at them, they smile briefly and then look away. And then, one by one, they rise off the floor too! They’re still dancing, bobbing and swaying like flowers, floating at different heights throughout the room.  
  
I turn back to Selene, and he’s suddenly much closer, his lips hovering only inches away. “Well?” he whispers.  
  
I take his face in my hands, and press my mouth against his, slowly, so I can tease him the way he’s teasing me. He lets out a little sigh and wraps his arms around me, and I forget all about teasing.  
  
After a while he murmurs, “Do you want to go for a walk?”  
  
I can’t speak, but I nod. We drift back down to the floor and walk out, his arm wrapped tightly around my waist and mine draped around his shoulders. He steers me to a nearby park—was that there before? I can’t remember—and we amble along the paths until we come to a graceful tree whose branches bend down all the way to the grass, forming a thick leafy curtain around the trunk. Selene pulls me through the branches into the space inside, and I guess this must be a popular spot, because there’s a bench there. We sit down, and I look up at the moonlight filtering through the leaves, remembering Selene-the-moon, and wondering if he can see us.  
  
The half-hidden eye of the moon, the supple elegance, the secrecy. “Is this tree a Deimos?” I ask suddenly.  
  
Selene grins. “Don’t worry, he won’t talk.”  
  
I laugh, and he sidles closer, sliding a hand up under my shirt. His lips are even more insistent than before, and I know we’re still on the bench but I feel like I’m floating again. Somehow I can’t forget where we are, though. Not the tree or the park, but the city. “Is it hard for you guys here—Selenes, I mean—when there are so many of us and so few of you?”  
  
He gives me a look for the interruption, but answers. “It can get a little frustrating sometimes, but we’re hot property, so you all know you have to go above and beyond if you want a chance with us.”  
  
“My host said all the Selenes had a crush on us!” I blurt out. Maybe I’ve had a little too much tequila, or maybe I’m drunk on kisses.  
  
He runs a finger along my arm to make me shiver. “You may be cute, but you’re a dime a dozen. If I don’t like the way one of you is acting, I can just go find another one. Or two or three. It’s not like you’re that hard to get.” He glances at the neckline of my tank top.  
  
“Hey!” I tug it back up above nipple level. “But, uh…what’s a dime?”  
  
He smiles. “An old Earth unit of currency. Very small.”  
  
“So if we’re so cheap and common, why pick _me_?” I should be insulted, but I have the feeling that he likes me more than he’s admitting. Also _kisses_.  
  
“You’re new. There’s a certain…something...about new people.” He nuzzles my neck. “Almost a smell. So many possibilities.”  
  
“Don’t the rest of you have possibilities too? They told me you can change jobs or houses whenever you want to.”  
  
“Well, yes, but…it’s different.”  
  
“How?”  
  
Selene sighs. “Once you’ve settled in, you’ve taken a road in a certain direction. You can still go anywhere from that road, but you can’t erase the trail you leave behind you. What you’ve done, who you’ve been, changes what you can become.”  
  
“Oh. Okay…?” What is he talking about? I can’t concentrate on that right now. “So, what’s my expiration date? How long do I stay fresh and new?”  
  
“Seven days,” he answers instantly.  
  
“What? Seriously?”  
  
“Seven days from the time you arrive. You got registered after you arrived, right?”  
  
“Of course. Well, the next morning. I got here at night.”  
  
He waves dismissively. “Give or take a few hours, of course. But once you go back to the registration office and list your chosen occupation and get your own home, you’re no longer new. You’re one of us.”  
  
“And everyone will be able to tell that just by looking at me?”  
  
“Yes.” It’s a very firm yes. Selene drapes his leg over mine with a whisper of silk, and I’m suddenly breathless at the way the fringe falls away to bare his inner thigh. He takes my hand and places it right on the spot where I was looking. I can’t help it—I slide down to my knees and replace the hand with my mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a Praxis who sometimes comes and sits under the Deimos tree. Once he fell asleep there, and when he woke up the roots had twisted all around his body and he couldn't move. They didn't let him out for hours, but strangely enough he didn't mind.


	6. Potestas

This time I was in the Edifice, fixing something. Or was I making some improvement of my own? Something like that. I liked this dream because even though it was tricky and took some thought, I felt very confident about what I was doing. I didn’t even need Selene there to help me! I felt so good about it that when I was done I decided to go fix the other away ships too. Haha! Like anyone would let me do that in real life! Can you imagine what Phobos would say?  
  
For some reason I wake up in the dark, in a cold sweat. Why? It was a happy dream. The dreams are getting better, but for some reason they’re making me feel worse. Maybe because they remind me of where I came from and how much I don’t know. Ugh. I need to figure this all out without getting so distracted all the time. Maybe I need to talk to a scientist instead of going on tours all day.  
  
As if he’d heard my thought, Afanasi makes a little sleepy sound and reaches out to pull me closer. Awww. Am I really going to have to move out once my seven days are up? It seems a little lonely to have your own house and be the only one who lives in it. There must be people who prefer having roommates, or people in relationships who move in with each other, right?  
  
This time I call up the registration office before they can text me, asking to talk to someone who works on figuring out this place. The Helios who answers says very reasonably that everybody here does that in their own way so could I explain more about what I was trying to find?  
  
“I, um…I guess I want to know more about…how the physics works? And how it’s connected with the—” I almost call it the real world. “Place we came from?”  
  
“Hmm. Let me find someone and call you back, okay?”  
  
“Sure, thanks.” I don’t know why I feel so weird about asking this, almost as if I were doing something against the rules.  
  
Eventually they call back and tell me there’s an Ethos who’s agreed to see me, and I can meet him at the registration office. I confess that I’m not sure I remember how to get there, and they tell me that because I’ve already been there once, I should be able to just concentrate on it and follow the feeling of where it is. And that the same applies to people I’ve met, unless they don’t want to be found.  
  
Ok. Sure. I think, _boy, V is going to be tickled to hear about this when I get back_ , and suddenly remember with a jolt that that’s unlikely to ever happen. If you believe any of the people I’ve talked to, that is. And why wouldn’t I?  
  
Why _would_ you, I argue with myself. They don’t seem to want to go back. If this place gives you what you want, and you want to get out, shouldn’t it let you? But do I really want to leave? That’s another question entirely. I stare at my wrist, then sigh and head out.  
  
It’s cloudy out, and after a few minutes a fine light spray starts to fall. I wonder who determines the weather, and how? Does it go by the number of people who want each type of weather? Do they have a schedule, so the plants will get the right amount of water—and if so, how do they put it into action? Do they get a bunch of people to think really hard about it each time to make the weather change, or did they only do it once to set the system in place? It’s exhausting having to ask myself questions like this constantly, about every part of existence. But I must want to, or I wouldn’t be doing it.  
  
Oh, wow, there it is! That was quick.  
  
The Ethos is sitting in the waiting room tapping on a laptop, but he jumps up and holds out his hand right away. “I am so happy you called! Hardly anyone wants to talk about this stuff!” We head off into a small conference room and sit down. “You’re Afon, right? I’m Theo. It’s not my original name nor do I think I’m god, haha—it’s just an incomplete anagram for Ethos. So what did you want to know?”  
  
I open my mouth and then close it again. “Um. Well—I…essentially I’m trying to figure out how we got here and why. And if it’s possible to go back. Or at least communicate with our original timelines.”    
  
He raises an eyebrow, but leans forward enthusiastically. “Big questions! But good ones. Not many people are interested in them, even when they’re new here.”  
  
“Yeah, why is that? How can an entire huge city full of people disappear into a place where the laws of physics don’t apply and just _not care how_? I don’t understand.”  
  
“Another good question. As usual with big questions like that, we don’t have any definitive answers. But most of us socioedologists think that most people like it better here and just don’t want to think about it. Oh sorry,” he says when I open my mouth. “Edology means ‘the study of here.’ I know, it’s weird that we never really came up with a name for the place. People have proposed names, but they could never get most people to agree to them, partly because most of the names implied a certain uh, view of the nature of this place and its purpose. Which was and is also contested.”  
  
“Uh—okay. So…” I feel like I must have asked a question, but I can’t remember what it—oh yeah. “Maybe I’m paranoid, but I feel like every time I try to find out something connected to those questions I asked you, someone interrupts or something happens to distract me.”  
  
“Aha! You’re not the first person to notice that. Evan Wolkow calls it geosophical attention diversion, or GAD for short. Because it makes you gad about, see? Haha. Okay. That might have been an example of it right there. So yeah, that’s a real thing, we’ve done studies on it. One study put people in an empty room and asked them to talk out loud about specific subjects for as long as they could, and if they were asked to talk about _those_ questions they got off track much sooner, or suddenly needed to use the bathroom, or suddenly remembered somewhere else they had to be.”  
  
“Wow, so…do you think something’s trying to prevent us from talking about it?”  
  
“Well, it’s hard to say, because usually the distraction appears to come from within the person, or another person. It could be an unconscious defense mechanism to cope with stress or cognitive dissonance or survivor’s guilt. And when people really _want_ to ask those questions, they have much better success at maintaining the topic than people who have no interest in it.”  
  
“Okay. So…what do you think are the answers, then?”  
  
“To what?”  
  
“To the questions. How did we get here? Can we communicate with our timelines? Can we go back?”  
  
“Oh, of course! Sorry. I think I got a little GAD there, haha. Or maybe I just like talking about my work too much. Or—”  
  
I clear my throat.  
  
“Yes. Okay. So, I personally hold back from making a decision on my opinion of the nature of this place, because that might bias me against new data. What I really want is to find out the truth, not to know it all already, if that makes any sense.”  
  
“ _I_ want to know it all. The important parts, anyway.”  
  
“Oh! I see. Well…”  
  
“Do you think we’re dead?” I interrupt.  
  
Ethos—Theo, I mean—raises his eyebrows. “That is a very popular theory. It has some evidence for and some against. Most of us did come here from the derelict, which appears to have been a dangerous environment in that its crew disappeared and we blacked out before suddenly appearing here. Since nobody who is alive knows what happens after death, it could possibly be something like this. Then again, the population dynamics seem very odd for an afterlife—millions of people from millions of different timelines, but most of them are versions of you, and almost all of them were on board a derelict. No one else.”  
  
“Yeah, that’s what makes me wonder.”  
  
“Another theory is that we and the derelict’s original crew were teleported into a sort of holographic alien prison or zoo and fed psychoactive drugs to make us docile and receptive. Or that just _one_ of us was, and that one person is imagining all the other inhabitants.”  
  
“Ugh. I don’t like that one.”  
  
“Most people don’t. Although if we’re in that one, it does imply that there could be a chance of getting out.”  
  
“So has anyone ever got out? I heard that some people disappear.”  
  
He leans forward again. “Now that is a very interesting question. We know some people have disappeared, but we don’t know where they went. But you want to know the really interesting thing about it? We don’t know how or why this is, but records indicate that _all_ the people who disappear were new. Not most, all. Everyone else who appears to have disappeared turns up again eventually, and we find out they were just willing themselves to be unfindable. And it’s never just one person from a timeline who disappears. Everyone from that timeline goes.”  
  
“Whoa. And new means…here for less than seven days?”  
  
“Right. Give or take a few hours. The first day is the day you check in at the registration office, and that day ends at 23:59, so your "first day" usually isn't exactly 24 hours. Unless it's been over 24 hours and you still haven't checked in, in which case it starts the moment you get here. The end point is when your chosen profession becomes registered in the system—and you can’t delay it. We’ve tested that too. Even if the registration people wait until later, the system itself assigns you a profession and you stop being new.”  
  
“Even if I don’t want it to?”  
  
“Even then. Once the clock hits 23:59 on the seventh day (or 11:59 pm, if you use a civilian clock), LOPHI will register you if no one’s already done it manually.”  
  
“LOPHI? I thought that was just the search engine.”  
  
“Nope, it’s an entire system. It runs basically everything that needs running. Some people think it’s an AI. But maybe they just _want_ to think that.” He beams as if he’d made a joke, but I don’t find it funny.  
  
I’m suddenly really hungry, but I struggle to focus. “So, what did the people who disappeared do to make themselves disappear?”  
  
“We don’t know. They usually didn’t do it in front of other people, and our monitors only show where a person is, not what they’re doing. But of those that were seen disappearing, about a third of them were online at the time. That’s the most common pattern.”  
  
“Hmm. Do you think it would help to ask LOPHI about it?”  
  
“You could try. It doesn’t give very consistent answers, though.”  
  
“Do you think it would _hurt_ to ask?”  
  
“I can’t think why it would. Even if LOPHI were part of what’s keeping us here, it can hear everything we’re saying, so it would already know you were thinking about that stuff anyway.”  
  
I suddenly can’t fit anything else in my head. “Okay. I need to go away and think about all this now.”  
  
“Sure. Feel free to call me if you have any more questions! It was great talking to you!” Theo holds up his phone, and I tap mine against his in the way Afanasi showed me.  
  
On my way out of the building, I catch sight of the poem fragment again and, on impulse, stop to look up the rest of it on my phone.  
  
_I loved you, so I drew these tides of_

_Men into my hands_

_And wrote my will across the_

_Sky in stars_

_To earn you freedom, the seven_

_Pillared worthy house,_

_That your eyes might be_

_Shining for me_

_When I came_

  
_Death seemed my servant on the_

_Road, 'til we were near_

_And saw you waiting:_

_When you smiled and in sorrowful_

_Envy he outran me_

_And took you apart:_

_Into his quietness_

  
_Love, the way-weary, groped to your body,_

_Our brief wage_

_Ours for the moment_

_Before Earth's soft hand explored your shape_

_And the blind_

_Worms grew fat upon_

_Your substance_

  
_Men prayed me that I set our work,_

_The inviolate house,_

_As a memory of you_

_But for fit monument I shattered it,_

_Unfinished: and now_

_The little things creep out to patch_

_Themselves hovels_

_In the marred shadow_

_Of your gift._

  
Whoa. I don’t know what to think about that. Lunchtime, lunchtime, lunchtime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ethos: coolest science bro.
> 
> The poem, again, is from Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence.


	7. Propositum

Selene was yelling at me about something. And Cain was there too for some reason. Both of them were yelling at me! What did I do? I couldn’t really understand what they were yelling about, or why both of them would be yelling at me at once. Why should I listen to this? I have better things to do. I finally got tired of that bullshit and left.  
  
Ugh. That wasn’t a very nice dream. Cain is kind of a jerk, but he’s never got all up in my face like that. And Selene may snap at me sometimes, but he’s never full-on shouted. I still feel like it’s happening in a way. Ugh.  
  
Forget that. Go shower. Whoops, Afanasi’s already in there. But he’s smiling at me, he doesn’t mind if I join him. Oh! Well then. This is _much_ better. Mmmh.  
  
Clean and feeling a little more sane now. Sleepy, but sane. Actually I might go back to bed for a while. I’m _really_ sleepy.  
  
Oh god what time is it. Shit. Why did I sleep so much? What did I even _do_ yesterday that made me this tired? Walked around a lot, I guess. I went to a bar, too, and got caught up in some trivia contest, and then went staggering around to other bars with three or four more of me. We decided to go serenade a Selene that one of them knew, and he threw a bucket of ice water on us from the second story window. _When Selene hits your eye like a big pizza pie that’s amore_. Hmm. Now that I’m sober those are terrible lyrics.  
  
Shit. I remember now. It must be that GAD thing again. Dammit. Only a day and a half left. I still don’t even quite know whether I want to leave, but fuck me if I’m going to let myself be pushed around like this. Even if it is by my own brain. I have to talk to LOPHI.  
  
I get dressed (I figured the I HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO PROCRASTINATE t-shirt seemed appropriate), pick up my phone and stagger down to the kitchen to get breakfast. Lunch. Whatever. Cereal and a banana. I sit down at the kitchen table and start eating, remember LOPHI, swear, pick up the phone. It’s like something my brain doesn’t want to look at, and keeps looking away from whenever I’m not concentrating really hard. But I will. Because this is important. “I want to find out,” I say out loud, trying to convince myself.  
  
Okay. Here goes. I turn on the phone, noting that there’s no message from the registration office. I guess they somehow sensed that I didn’t want one, or maybe they figured that after yesterday I’ve struck out on my own. _Focus_. I look at V smiling up from my wrist, then open the browser. Remembering what Theo said, I decide to just talk to it instead of typing. “All right, LOPHI,” I tell it sternly. “I want answers. No distractions this time.”  
  
Gah! The cartoon fish is suddenly hovering animated on the screen, grinning at me. It’s the whole fish this time, not just the head. Its lipless mouth moves, and white words spill out onto a black screen. WHAT INFORMATION DO YOU SEEK? I WILL ANSWER THREE QUESTIONS, LIKE THE FISH THAT GRANTS WISHES.  
  
What the—? Oh well. “How did I get here?”  
  
YOU TOOK THE BAIT.  
  
What the fuck does that mean? Going onto the derelict? Going into the captain’s cabin? Something else? “Please clarify that answer. What was the bait?”  
  
IS THAT YOUR SECOND QUESTION?  
  
“Aah, dammit, no. I guess not.” Think think think. I have so many questions. What’s most important? “Am I dead?”  
  
NOT YET.  
  
Shit. Does that mean…I _will_ die if I stay here? Is _that_ what being new means, that your body is still alive back where you came from? I want to ask but I only have one question left now. My first one was stupid. Oh well. “How can I get back alive to my own timeline?”  
  
UNRAVEL THE NET BEFORE IT RISES.  
  
“What? What the fuck does that mean? That is NOT helpful. Jesus.”  
  
GOOD LUCK, LITTLE FISH. The horrible, grinning thing flicks its cartoon tail at me and swims offscreen. The words fade into blackness.  
  
“LOPHI! LOPHI what the hell. AAAAAH. Wait what’s that?” Something new is fading in, some kind of picture. It looks like…an intro screen for a game? It’s turned on its side, so I turn the phone around into landscape mode so I can see it properly. Well, it’s still really tiny. I wish the phone could expand so I can see better—oh wow, it’s doing it! It’s a tablet now. I can see why people want to keep the laws of physics—it’s unnerving to see something transform before your eyes like that, just because you wanted it to. Too much power.  
  
Ok, now I can see it. Whoa—it’s got a picture of me on it! Not a photo, but a greyscale drawing. I look really moody. I hope I don’t look like that in real life. There are other people standing to either side of me, too: Selene and the commander on the right, Abel (what is with his _eyes?!_ ) and Cain and Deimos on the left. Why them in particular? The game title, hovering just under us in shiny metallic letters, doesn’t enlighten me. Starfighter Eclipse? Eclipse of the what? Maybe it’s a ship name? I don’t recall any of them being named Eclipse, though.  
  
Oh well. I’m obviously supposed to play this game. Maybe if I win it, I can go home? I hope there’s no slidey puzzles in it, I’m terrible at them. Give me stuff to shoot and I’m good. I click New Game.  
  
Okay that’s fucking creepy. It starts out with a black screen, and then there are words down at the bottom. It’s what V said to me before she left! What the fuck. And then…there’s me! The back of me, anyway. And then my face? Still looking kind of cartoony. Whatever, it’s a game, I’d better get used to it. Now it’s me about to board the Kepler for the first time! There’s Athos nearby—I don’t think I noticed him at the time. And now there’s Abel, coming up to talk to me just like he did in real life. Game Helios stops narrating and two choices pop up: What I actually said and…wow, a really Phobos kind of answer. I’ll click what I actually said. God that was so embarrassing, but Abel was nice about it. And yep, there’s Cain having a mini hissy fit. Haha, he didn’t sweat like that in real life, though.  
  
It just keeps going. Meeting a weirdly smug-looking Encke in the hall—and another option to be a jerk, why?! Meeting Selene in the bunk—you can be a jerk, or normal, and this time there’s a third option: terrible flirt. I click on the terrible flirt option before I even know what my fingers are doing. That is _not_ what I really said. Haha, he likes it! _Top or bottom_ , ohmygod.  
  
Now there’s V in shadow, looking sad and cartoony. Now there’s another title screen, and a long animation sequence. What—what is even happening here. What—ok it came back to the original picture again. Now it’s back to the game. Two weeks later, it says. Terrible flirt option again, I can’t help myself, cartoon Selene is so cute. Not that real Selene isn’t even cuter, of course. Ahem. Anyway. Try to remember that this is probably a matter of life and death?  
  
And now we’re at the briefing about the derelict. Huh, that happened after more than a month in real life, not two weeks. Anyway. Gratuitous shot of me and Selene changing…okay. And now…we’re on the derelict. Phobos being a jerk again, but this time around it’s kind of funny. The creepy hallway. And then….the captain’s cabin. With two options: go in or don’t. Going in is what got me here in the first place—is that the wrong choice? But then again, if I pick it I might find out what happened to me. Better save—I can save, right? Yes, good.  
  
All right. Go in it is. Oh no, Selene looks so worried. Be firm. Ok, I’m in there. A flash, an actual flash that startles real me. And V’s outline, just for a second—what the hell? I don’t remember that. The screen’s going black, yikes. This can’t be good. And…game me wakes up on the bridge of the Kepler, dead people everywhere, apparently life support is down and I’m dying of hypoxia. GAME OVER. Great. What does that mean? Can I play again? I stab wildly at the screen, and after a moment the game menu fades back in. New Game, Continue, Options, etc. Phew.  
  
Okay, before I leap into this again, I need to figure out what happened. It looks like game me must have blacked out for a long time, long enough at least to get back onto the Kepler, but my unconscious body somehow kept doing things? Murderous and suicidal things? Shit. Is that what’s happening to real me? Am I dreaming here while my body is doing bad things, maybe being controlled by something? Why would it let me wake up just before I die? Maybe that’s just artistic license, so the player knows what happened.  
  
My mind wants to veer off, think about something nicer, but I force it back on track. If that _is_ happening to me, why is LOPHI letting me know about it? Is it on my side? Does it just want to taunt me? Or does it want to be sporting?  
  
Maybe I have to find the right ending? I hit New Game, scroll past the intro stuff, and start again. This time I don’t go into the captain’s cabin, and it’s Abel who gets knocked out by the flash instead. Shit. I need to find a version where _no one_ gets knocked out! That must be the key!  
  
I start watching for Abel to see what he does, and play it through until—shit I died. Let’s try it again. Hmm ok, so it looks like Abel’s personality changes. He starts out flirty and gets progressively nastier, but also seems to have moments where he’s more like himself again. He turns off life support, sabotages ships, messes with the engines, and eventually doesn’t even try to hide what he’s doing. He’s trying to kill everyone. Shit. Have I been doing all that? Ugh. Okay I finally survived this time. Selene comes up with a way to de-brainwash people with a different kind of light flash, and we fixed Abel with it. Well, there’s hope at least!  
  
Okay, so…that was a win. I think. Everything turned out fine, no one died, Abel got deprogrammed. But nothing’s happening to real me here. I’ll try wishing really hard to go back. Hmm, nope. So just winning won’t do it. Am I just waiting for real life Selene to figure it out and deprogram me? I don’t like that. It’s too easy for everyone to die based on little insignificant choices. And…the dreams! I have dreams in the game that tell me what’s happening. Are my dreams here doing that too? That doesn’t sound good. I have to keep playing.  
  
Let’s try for a “no one gets brainwashed in the first place” result. This time I’m getting systematic and writing down everything I do and everything that happens (was that pad of paper there or did I just create it? Whatever).  
  
Shit, I was afraid this might happen. I’ve played every possible combination of choices up until we get off the derelict, and there is no way at all to make sure no one gets brainwashed. Either Abel gets brainwashed and the game continues, or I get brainwashed and it ends right away. Maybe the key is something later? I don’t know. I’m starting to panic because I can’t imagine what it would be if it isn’t the things I thought of already.  
  
I just have to play it all out. Every possible route. Better tear off some more sheets from the notepad, because this shit is getting _complicated._  
  
I’ve been playing it for so long now that I’ve passed the point of resistance. I don’t even have any desire to get distracted from it. I accept that this is my life, playing this game over and over again with no end in sight. The sheets are covering the table and starting to fall off, so I pick them up and move to the living room floor where there’s more room to spread them out. I start coming up with shorthand notations so I can fit more on each sheet of paper. At one point I feel a hand on my shoulder, vaguely hear Afanasi’s voice, but I can’t pay attention to it. There’s suddenly a sandwich in my hand, and I eat it quickly so I’ll have both hands free again. Now there’s a cup of tea. I can’t have that spilling on my notes, so now it’s a bottle of water.  
  
I’m starting to actually pay attention to the plot now that I have the notation process down. What kind of game is this? I guess it’s like a mystery, but with really explicit sex scenes. Of course I noticed them before, but I was so focused on getting to the next choice menu that I wasn’t really paying attention. Game me is kind of slutty. Then again he never seems to have sex with more than two people per route, and that’s what I’ve been doing here, so, uh….anyway.

The playthroughs are all running together in my head and it makes it feel like game me is just falling in bed with anyone who asks. And he hardly ever seems to have things _he_ wants. It’s always, “What do you want, where do you want me, what should I do.” Am I like that in real life? Do I just let everyone tell me what to do? It’s feeling familiar, and it makes me uncomfortable. I know it’s not always true, because I wouldn’t even be here in the first place if I had done what Selene said, but I still feel disturbed.  
  
Actually, I’m starting to feel uncomfortable with the very idea of being in this game. It’s like I’m a puppet. Anyone who plays it can control me, make me act however they want, make me fuck people, even make me die. A lot of the things you can make me do are really mean, especially to Selene. It almost seems like the game wants me to end up with Selene, because in order to NOT end up with him I have to be cruel, and also bad things happen to other people in the end.  
  
I get the feeling that the game is telling the player _sure, you can go pay attention to someone else, but you’d better feel really guilty if you do_. What kind of a choice is that, if people die or go to prison if you don’t have sex with one particular person? And there are no endings where I choose not to have sex with anybody, other than the endings where I die! Well okay, there’s one, but I still end up kissing someone. What kind of a choice is _that?_ What if I just want to focus on my work for a while? What if I want to date several people? What if I’m not sure what I want and I want to figure it out as I go along?  
  
Selene is super cute and brilliant and funny and interesting and I like him a lot, but sometimes I get the feeling he doesn’t think I’m very smart. And maybe I’m not, but I’m not stupid either and I don’t want to be treated like I am. And he’s so jealous! He doesn’t want me to have close friends other than him. He gets mad if I just talk to Abel, much less have lunch with him—he almost sounds like Cain sometimes. Wait, that was in the game, not real life—they’re starting to blur together, gah. But it fits with real life, even though he doesn’t act that dramatic and obvious. In real life he sometimes gets tense and snippy when I pay attention to other people. I think he’s afraid I don’t like him, and maybe afraid he’s not good enough—which is crazy! he’s amazing!—but even if he is feeling bad, he doesn’t get to control me to make himself feel better.  
  
In spite of all that, I have to admit I _am_ interested in him. Especially after um, everything that’s happened here in the city. I just want to have a choice about it, and I want him to respect me.  
  
Okay, very nice decision, Afon, but maybe you should try getting back to him first because if you don’t your resolutions aren’t going to matter to anyone. I _am_ trying, though! It’s just taking forever. And I haven’t got forever. Better get back to it.  
  
Oh look, a route where Deimos decides he wants to have sex with me. Once. And then goes back to ignoring me as usual. Weird. He’s kinda cute, but I don’t know if I really want to know about his kinks. It seems kind of invasive. What if I get back and every time I see him I have to think about that scene in the cargo hold and how I know stuff about him that he doesn’t know I know?  
  
Afon, that is the least of your problems right now. Concentrate. Okay.  
  
Holy shit, something’s different here. It ended, I clicked through the credits…and the game’s continuing! What is this? Did I finally get somewhere?! Another ship, a human ship. They know my name? What! Is it—there she is. My god. She’s okay! Just standing there on the bridge like nothing ever happened. That’s just like her, too, to decide the task name thing is bullshit and she's going to ignore it. Now it’s the real end. Does that mean real V is okay too? She must be, she didn’t show up here with me. Unless…well, I don’t want to think about that. V’s smart. She’ll make it.  
  
Okay, was that it? Do I get to go home now? Apparently not. Shit, what else do I have to do? I don’t even know what time it is anymore. All I can do is keep playing this goddamn game. Over and over and over and over….  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fourth wall? What fourth wall?
> 
> Sorry for dragging you through that rehash of Eclipse, but Helios needed it to figure some stuff out. And uh, so did I.
> 
> Thank you to GoodyearTheShippyCat for helping me with several thorny Eclipse questions whose answers eluded me! I'm still not sure that I got everything right, but if not you can chalk it up to Helios' state of mind.


	8. Progressio

Deimos tried to stab me! What the fuck? I did _nothing_ to him. I got the knife away but he kept kicking and biting and trying to get it back. I had to throw him in a closet and lock it from the outside. Jeez. People are going crazy around here. Someone has to do something, and no one else is volunteering so I guess that person is me.  
  
_Aagh!_ I was asleep? When did I fall asleep? Yikes. That was not good. Bad, bad, bad. Even worse than the night before. Oh shit. Today is the last day. Get your shit together, Afon. This is a sign.  
  
I’m still sprawled on the living room floor. It’s carpeted with papers and the writing on the nearest few is an illegible scribble. Obviously there’s no way to win this game, at least not in the way I want. Think. Think. Playing LOPHI’s game doesn’t work. It’s rigged. What do you do when the game is rigged? You refuse to play. But if I refuse to play, I die and maybe everyone else on the Kepler does too, and my Valentina and I will never see each other again.  
  
Think think think. If the game is unwinnable, and you can’t refuse to play it, the only thing to do is…change the rules. How do I change the rules? I have to reprogram the game. But I don’t know how to do that! Can I learn in one day? Aaaah. Maybe Theo can help me, or at least tell me who could and would.  
  
I call him up and tell him I figured out something important and I need to see him right away. He sounds sleepy and confused, but he agrees. “Just let me go get some coffee first,” he says.  
  
“I’ll meet you there.” I get up, stretch carefully, and start off for the cafe. I don’t know which one it is, but it’s the one he’s going to and that’s all I need to know. I’m walking so fast that people are veering out of the way to avoid me. I see something strange out of the corner of my eye and turn to look. It’s a new me! He’s in his underwear, holding a dark bundle of fabric under one arm. He turns to run and disappears around the corner before I can call out to him. There’s no point chasing him now, he doesn’t want to be found. I’d better get a move on.  
  
Shit, there’s another one. This one’s in regular clothes, walking with a Cain, but I know he’s new. I don’t want to think about how I can be so sure he’s new. The seventh day isn’t up yet, city. Don’t you dare.  
  
There’s a third new me, sitting on a picnic blanket in the park with a Helios and an Athos, looking confused and a little scared. Did I look like that at first? Why are there so many new people? I don’t recall meeting any others before today. Could I—please tell me I haven’t been _creating_ them. I played that game so many times yesterday, and I died a lot. Did someone create _me_ by playing? Aah, this makes no sense. I have to talk to Theo.  
  
And there he is, waiting at a table in the corner of the cafe. He pushes a steaming mug over to me. “Here, have a latte. You look like you need it.”  
  
“Thanks.” I clutch the mug, more for comfort than thirst, and plunge into my story.  
  
He takes it very calmly, considering the implications, but his round blue eyes get even bigger and he leans further and further forward. “Okay,” he says finally. “Let me make sure I have this right. LOPHI told you to ‘unravel the net’ and then showed you this game. In every single game route at least one person gets brainwashed. In the routes where the ship is saved, Selene always creates a cure, which is administered forcibly. Brainwashing affects different people in different ways, but except in the case of Morena (who was severely affected but may not have been actually brainwashed) it always results in an attempt to attack or kill unaffected crew members. Brainwashed people appear to have very little sense of self-preservation and are eventually killed off along with the rest of the crew if not cured.”  
  
“Right,” I nod.  
  
“And you think, having eliminated the other obvious options, that the key to going back is to reprogram the game to contain a route where no one gets brainwashed. And you need to do this before midnight tonight.”  
  
“Right. So can you help me do it? I think I’m supposed to do it myself, but I have no idea how.”  
  
“Well, it’s not my area of expertise, but I can try. Can I see?”  
  
I hand him the tablet that used to be my phone. He touches his phone to it, then hands my tablet back.  
  
“Hmm, this is going to need something a lot bigger than a phone—let me just enlarge it….” He pulls on the sides of his phone, and it expands to a huge flat screen that’s wider than the table. “Actually….” he pulls on the table on the same way, and it expands about two feet to the side. An Abel at the next table gives him a look, but doesn’t say anything. Theo pulls a keyboard out of somewhere and puts it on the table in front of him. “All right, I’m going to have a look at the source code. You might want to start writing up the text for your new ending, if you haven’t already.”  
  
“Oh! Yeah, I’ll do that.” I take a long swig of coffee, and begin. Or…at least I open a document and stare at the page. How _am_ I realistically going to keep everyone from looking at the screens? I can’t smash them all fast enough, because they’re on two different ends of the ship, and who knows how many more there could be scattered throughout. The same problem applies to shouting to distract people into turning their faces away at the moment of the flash. And…realistically, how would game me even know that the screens are dangerous? I have a strong feeling that I need to make it at least somewhat plausible.  
  
Although…if I’m rewriting this I can rewrite bits of the ship too, right? Maybe some of the original crew figured it out and smashed most of the screens before they died. Although, wait—I think I saw smashed screens already in the game. Let me check—yeah! The screens in the picture are all broken. And V talks about a floor with broken glass on it. Abel gets brainwashed by a flash that didn’t even come from a screen, and come to think of it, it didn’t look like there was actually a screen in the captain’s cabin either.  
  
Besides, even if I changed it so the flash needs a screen to work, we’re still going to bring the virus back with us in the data spike, and the navigators and comp techs will all get infected the moment they start looking at the new data. Although…I was the only one who remembered the data spike in the game. What if I didn’t remember and we left it on the derelict? No, they’d just send us back to get it, and anyway, the whole reason that we were rushing to get out was because Abel collapsed after being infected. I don’t think we would’ve run out without the data just because of a flash and a noise, even if it did make our ears bleed.  
  
Maybe I should get crazy and just write the Anglers out of existence, or make it so we never ran into the derelict in the first place. Just turn it into some kind of deep space dating sim. But then I’d have to rewrite most of the game, not just one branch, and I don’t think I have the time. Although—do I really have an obligation to keep the game long enough to be satisfyingly playable? Maybe I’ll try cutting it off before it gets to the briefing session, or…I’ll keep the briefing session, but this time it won’t be about the derelict. It’ll be…an announcement that the Colterons have surrendered and the war is over. And then all the ending choices will come from who you chose to talk to in the briefing room earlier. You’ll end up with any of them or nobody at all, but all the endings will be good and V will come back safe and sound. I can write one ending as a template and then change it a little to fit the different people and circumstances. Okay. Here goes. I haven’t tried writing stories since I was a kid—I hope I’m not too bad at it.  
  
I’m just about done with the ending template when Theo calls me over to his side of the table. “Okay, so the code is actually pretty simple. I rigged up a special IDE for you, though, so you should be able to change the game without knowing how to code. Here’s a map of the whole thing—see how it’s like a tree and it branches out from the beginning? Each of these little circles represents the results of a previous choice, and contains at least two choices of its own. Each of those choices leads to another circle, and so on, until the branch reaches an ending. Does that make sense? Ok, good. If you click on any of the circles, you can edit the content in that section, including the choices. Now, since you’re going to create at least one new ending, you’ll probably need some new graphics. You can do that by a creating a new document in this illustration program—here, I’ll leave it open for you—and just thinking really hard about the picture you want. When you’re all done editing, just hit the export button over here, and that will create a new copy of the game. You can save it to the desktop and then play it if you want. Does all that make sense?”  
  
I nod, hoping I’m understanding it right.  
  
Theo picks up his mug and stands up, pushing back the chair. “Okay, have a seat. I’m going to get something to eat, but I’ll stay in this room in case you have any questions, okay?”  
  
“Okay. Thank you so much!”  
  
He smiles. “No, thank _you!_ This is an amazing opportunity to collect data, whether or not you succeed. I’ll definitely get at least one paper out of it.”  
  
I sit down, stare at the map, and take a deep breath. Okay, Afon. You can do this.  
  
Three hours later—has it really been that long? god it’s almost 15:00 already—I have a badly-written but I think usable new game version. I tell Theo and he drags a chair over to watch me play. Can it really be this easy? Am I about to go back?  
  
Oh. I guess it’s not that easy. I pick the ambiguous ending, the one where it doesn’t say who I date, if anyone. V comes back and she and her navigator get transferred to the Kepler with me, and we make enough money in the next few years to go to college on Earth together when our tour of duty is over. Now I’ve played all the way to the end, the credits are over…I wait. Theo clears his throat.  
  
“I uh—okay. Maybe I have to pick one of the other endings?”  
  
He shrugs. “Can’t hurt to try, I guess?”  
  
All right. Here we go again. This time I pick the Selene ending, given that the original game seemed to want me to end up with him. Nothing. I play all the other endings in turn, and nothing changes except a growing sense of unease. “I think I need a break,” I tell Theo, and stand up unsteadily to go get some lunch. Early dinner. Whatever. Maybe I’ll be able to think more clearly once I eat something.  
  
When I come back with my toasted turkey sandwich and huge mango wheatgrass smoothie—I’m suddenly really hungry!—Theo looks up from his phone. “I’ve been thinking. I wonder if the key to this could possibly have something to do with the Anglers’ motives. If this game is true, or mostly true, wouldn’t that imply that they put us here? Why would they do that?”  
  
I swallow my bite of sandwich too fast, and stare at him. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s just how the brainwashing works? They pull our minds out of our bodies and store them somewhere while the virus tells the bodies what to do. But they’re going to kill off the bodies, so why store the minds anywhere when they could just delete them? They must be able to delete if they can transfer. Maybe…to get information from us? More than they can get from the ship’s systems? But the ship’s intranet has so much information about humans, I can’t think that any of us would possibly know more. And even if we do have information that they want, why aren’t they trying to get it from us? It’s hard for most people here to even _think_ about our original timelines, much less talk about them. Everything pushes you to forget and get involved with this world. Why else would it give us anything we want?”  
  
Theo nods, chin propped on his hand.  
  
“And,” I continue, “why would they bother making us want to stay here if it were impossible to get out and go back into our bodies?”  
  
“Maybe they just want to study us? It can be really useful to find out what your enemy wants and how they see the world.”  
  
“Maybe. But again, that doesn’t explain why they need to distract us from the idea of going back. If they’re smart enough to create this thing, they must be smart enough to make it inescapable. So they must have deliberately created a loophole that lets people out if they can find it, at least while they’re still new.”  
  
“Hmm. Why would they do that?”  
  
“To see if we can figure it out, I guess? Maybe they’re doing a study to see how many of us can figure it out in time. Or maybe they think isn’t sporting to give us no choice.” I stop suddenly. _No choice._ Brainwashing is all about taking away choices. I thought I was giving the player more choice by taking away the derelict, but maybe I need to let them be free to go there, and make the choices that lead to the brainwashing—because that’s how I got here, after all. I’m already here and I can’t just make time go backwards and keep myself from ever getting here. I can only use what I have at hand, I can only find a way out once I’m already here.

What I need to do…is change the virus itself so that the infected person can resist it, so they can stay conscious in their body and make choices. It’s probably unrealistic to make the virus completely ineffective, but I think it’s fair to make it incomplete, incomplete enough so that the infected person can warn Selene in time to create the cure.  
  
“Got it,” I tell Theo, who raises an eyebrow but nods. I don’t have time to fill you in, sorry Theo. I have to start writing. I push the rest of the sandwich away, take a long drink of smoothie, and pull up the original version of the game.  
  
Theo’s nudging me. “Afon. It’s 23:00. I just thought you should know.”  
  
Shit, I’ll be done soon, I just have to edit a few more branches. Don’t let yourself get bogged down trying to make it sound good, you don’t have to be Shakespeare. Just make it readable.  
  
“Afon. It’s 23:30.”  
  
“I’m almost there! I just have to check the endings….” I lose track of time again.  
  
“23:40.”  
  
“I’m done, I’m done! Look, I’m exporting.” I stab the button and sit back. “There it is. Ready to play.”  
  
“Afon?” There’s a hand on my shoulder, and the voice doesn’t belong to Theo. Here it is, my final hurdle, because it’s Afanasi standing over me looking lost and vulnerable, and I can’t make myself do anything but leap up and pull him into my arms while the world swims in front of me.  
  
“I think I did it,” I choke out. “It took so long but I did it. I have to go now, before midnight.”  
  
Afanasi rubs my back and gives me a gentle smile. “I thought it might be that. Congratulations! I'm so proud of you.”  
  
I cling harder to him. “You could come along.”  
  
He takes my face in his hands, like he did the first night. “Sweetheart, you know I can’t.”  
  
So I _was_ right. I bury my face in his shoulder, unable to let go.  
  
“It’s okay. I like it better here anyway. My timeline…really wasn’t a very nice place.”  
  
“Me too,” Theo pipes up. “I mean, mine wasn’t so bad, but this world is a lot better. You Helioses made it that way. Just think what it would’ve been like if it were mostly…Phobos or Cain or something.”  
  
I sniff. “Will you two tell the other new people? So they can try it if they want?” I don’t know if it will work if someone just tells you what you have to do, but it’s worth a try. They need to at least know that it’s possible to get out.  
  
“I will,” Afanasi promises.  
  
“I will too,” says Theo. “But you need to get going now.”  
  
“Okay.” I pull Afanasi closer and give him one last long, sweet kiss, then force myself to pull away and sit down. I open the new game, and suddenly LOPHI’s cartoon fish is hovering in the corner. It doesn’t say anything though. It just bobs there, waiting.  
  
Theo and Afanasi pull up chairs and watch me as I start to play. I click through each sequence quickly, but I don’t use the skip button. I want them to have time to read it. I remember clearly where each choice leads, and I take the shortest possible route with a good ending.  
  
Now V is smiling at me out of the last panel, and there’s just one more click left. In the corner, the cartoon fish suddenly flicks its tail and grins at me.  
  
_Now_. I press the button one last time, and the fish swims into the center, does a ridiculous little twisting flip, and swims off the screen.  
  
I feel Afanasi’s hand warm on my back. The screen fades into white, glows brighter and brighter, and the light spreads outward until it’s all I can see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Helios have you considered becoming a game developer? There's probably a pretty big market for it in the city--okay never mind.
> 
> Theo is internally wincing at the game ending where Helios goes to college on Earth, because it's clear that Helios has NO idea how much that costs.


	9. Baby Got Back

I’m—I’m—where am I? So bright in here. Hurts. A screen. Full of words and numbers. Don’t understand **_oh no I understand now_**. No, no, no! No. Delete, delete, delete. No. I don’t know if it worked. Have to find—where am I? Find Selene. Get up. Out the door. Find him. Where is he? Endless hallways. Zombies staggering through them. Ignore the zombies, only Selene matters. Bridge? No. Bunk? No. Hangar? No. Where is he? I’m yelling his name but no one seems to understand. My head hurts so much. It’s about to crack open.  
  
Medical. Too bright. But there he is! _Selene!_ Selene Selene Selene. You have to help me, I don’t know if I fixed it. Fixed what? The thing I did, of course. You have to stop me. Stop mumbling, Selene, sheesh. Get with it. You need to stop me. From what? From doing it. Again. Or—just stop me okay? And fix it.  
  
Hey what are you doing? I can’t move! Oh. You stopped me. Okay. Now fix— _AAAH THE LIGHT._

  
***  
  
Oh god, I feel like I’m gonna throw up. I probably will, if I open my eyes or move in any way. I’d better keep still for a while. Okay. That seems to make it bearable. Sort of. Now I don’t feel like barfing, I just feel like an entire Colteron is trying to bash its way out of my skull.  
  
Aah! Something touched my forehead! My eyes fly open and—Selene! I try to say his name but it just comes out as a croak.  
  
“Helios! You’re awake!” His face is very close now. It’s such a lovely face. I remember—oh my.  
  
“Where—are we?” I manage.  
  
“Medical, of course.”

His face retreats somewhat, and I blink with the effort of refocusing. “I’m back? I’m back!”  
  
He strokes my forehead again. His hand is cool and smooth. “You were never gone. Although you were acting pretty strange for a while.”  
  
“Did I—oh no. What did I do?”  
  
“Oh, not much. Just sabotaged all the away ships, locked Deimos in a closet, broke Cain’s arm, tried to kill us all but then changed your mind…”  
  
“Shit. Sorry. I didn’t mean—I don’t remember most of that.”  
  
“You remember some?”  
  
“Dreams. A little.” I suddenly remember one in particular. “Oh no. Did I, um.”  
  
“Did you what?”  
  
“Um. Uh. Did I…do something, uh, forward?”  
  
Selene bursts out laughing. “Of all the things you did, _that’s_ the one you’re most upset about?”  
  
“Well, I remember being kind of…pushy.”  
  
He stops smiling. “Do you regret it?”  
  
“Well, I um—I—I regret being pushy. And I regret not actually remembering much of it.”  
  
He exhales. “I didn’t mind you being pushy. Although I was sad when I found out it wasn’t really you doing it.”  
  
“It—kind of was? A little? I think?”  
  
“Well, if it happens again I want it to be definitely _all_ you.”  
  
“Oh wow. You mean—” My face is getting hot.  
  
“You are _so_ cute. No wonder you snuck past us for so long.”  
  
“What—what happened to me? I mean, my mind was in another place. For days. It was so real.” It _was_ real, wasn’t it?  
  
“Remember how I told you not to go in the captain’s cabin?”  
  
“Uh. Yeah.”  
  
“And remember how you did it anyway?”  
  
“ _Yes._ Come on.”  
  
“Well, you must have looked directly at a light when you were in there, and this virus that was infecting the ship’s systems took over your brain. Although we didn’t realize it at the time. There was a bright flash and a really loud noise, and when it stopped you had collapsed. Abel was in front of a different light but he turned around when I yelled at you not to go in there, and I think that’s why he didn’t get brainwashed too. You have to be looking directly at the light. So I guess in a way it was good that you went in there, because otherwise Abel would’ve been infected instead, and he probably would’ve done more damage than you did.”  
  
“What? Why?”  
  
“Because he’s a navigator. I’m impressed that you managed to fuck things up so well, though. You actually had me thinking for a while that a navigator was doing it.”  
  
“Well, I did study to be one. Even if it wasn’t at a fancy Earth school. And uh, even if I failed the test.”  
  
Selene is stroking my hair. It makes my head feel a little better. “Well, I guess you learned more than anybody knew!”  
  
“I’m not stupid, you know.”  
  
“Of course you’re not.”  
  
“I figured out how to get back. Not many people do that.”  
  
“Back from where?”  
  
“From…the place where my mind went. I did tell you to stop me, didn’t I? I think I remember that.”  
  
“Yes, I sent Cain and Deimos out to look for you, but they didn’t come back. I was in the med bay finishing up the cure, and suddenly you staggered in yelling about stopping you and fixing it and…something about a fish? Still have no idea what that was about. You wouldn’t stop shouting until I tied you down.” The corners of his mouth twitch. “I had no idea you were into bondage.”  
  
“Selene!” I’m blushing again, I know it.  
  
“Well, now I _know_ you’re back. Possessed you would’ve answered with something even saucier.”  
  
I close my eyes, and exhale. “I’m back. I’m really back! I can’t believe it.”  
  
“Where were you? Your consciousness, I mean.”  
  
“Oh god, that’s a really long story….”  
  
“And it’ll have to wait until later,” the MO interrupts. “Now that you’re awake I need to do some more scans, and then you need to rest.”  
  
“Ok, ok,” I grumble. “See you later, Selene?”  
  
“As soon as your implacable guardian allows it.” He leans forward and presses a soft kiss against my forehead.

  
***  
  
I wake up thirsty and needing to pee. Why do those two things always happen at the same time? I pry myself out of bed and shuffle off to the med bay bathroom. On my way back, a nearby screen blinks, catching my eye. In spite of everything that’s happened this past week, what do I automatically do? I look at it. It’s just human nature, okay?  
  
The readouts fade to black, and new words appear one by one on the screen. YOU HAVE PASSED THE TEST. YOUR SPECIES NOW HAS PROTECTED STATUS IN THIS TIMELINE. CONGRATULATIONS, LITTLE FISH.

  
***

  
I’m not really sure if Selene believes me about the city, but he says he does. And he definitely believes I didn’t do all that damage on purpose, because he managed to convince the commander that it wasn’t my fault. Even Cain and Deimos are speaking to me again. Well, as much as Deimos ever speaks. I try not to think too much about all the stuff that happened in the game. It helps that what I’m looking at is their real selves, instead of those weird stylized drawings.  
  
When the Siddha hails us, it isn’t the middle of the night, it’s an hour after breakfast. I’m already on the bridge, about to be kicked out because I’ve been hovering behind Selene for so long, whispering in his ear and tickling him to see if he can keep quiet. There’s Argon, and now there’s Xenon. I hold my breath.  
  
And there she is, my V. Maybe this wasn’t a mistake after all.


End file.
